View Events by Location

[gxgEric]

I cannot use IP.Calendar until it supports location filtering capability.

We have members all across the United States that post events in our forums and I would love to relocate the event listings to the Calendar, but it would be an absolute mess for users looking for events in their area.

Ideally, it would be nice if each event had a street address and the user could filter events by mileage. For example: show me events within 25 miles of Raleigh, NC.

See my current Events Forum:
http://www.genxglow.com/forum/25-upcoming-events-forum/

[CallieJo]

Great suggestion!

Location filtering is better than the mess I have done. I've created a calender for every area. But, unless an end-user knows to click the drop-down menu with the default calendar name on it, they will not find the other calendars within a default setup.

I would also like to suggest to take this a step further by adding the ability to show a google map for each event so people can see how to get there.

Examples of using google maps:
Membermap in the marketplace does a good job at showing where people and places are by using a location entered.
Jomsocial uses google maps for their events. You add the address and it will post a map into the event page.

[TracyIsland]

Our community is worldwide and we have 13 calendars beyond the birthday calendar. We leverage the RSS feature with each calendar. First, we have an aggregated widget with all the RSS feeds thrown together, with the dates in ascending order. Next, we have web pages dedicated to each country and use the RSS feed from a given calendar to show the events for that region in a widget for for each country page.

Now, Esther Eisner's new Calendar Template System should allow you to add additional fields for the calendar templates. Maybe the more sophisticated php'ers on here could come up with a datapoint that would be useful but my offhand suggestion would be to divide the areas into regions and have a dropdown that lists the regions ... then you could use that in an IP Content block to do a query of events for a given region.

I'll give Esther a heads up about this post and maybe she can weigh in on a better approach.

[CallieJo]

Next, we have web pages dedicated to each country and use the RSS feed from a given calendar to show the events for that region in a widget for for each country page.

This is similar to what I started doing. I also have a page dedicated to event categories and list all calendars on that page to choose from instead of relying on the current calendar index page.