Attractive Wordpress Calendars

May 23, 2013 2:14 PM

Any recommendations for stylish but functional Wordpress calendars?

I'm running a Wordpress website for a community that cares about design. We're hoping to add a calendar with various community events, but all the calendar plug-ins that I can seem to find look, well, blocky -- a bit like most of the calendars here.

Any thoughts on where I can find a stylish but functional Wordpress calendar? The capabilities don't have to be much, and we're willing to pay a little (though not a lot). The most important thing is that the calendar not feel like some blocky plug-in.

For what it's worth, too, I'm relatively new to Wordpress, but we have folks who can guide us on something more complicated.

Thanks in advance for the ideas!

posted by vecchio to Technology (6 answers total)

Best answer: Time.ly, which can be found at your link, actually offers calendar views that are anything BUT blocky. Very stylish, with color options, images embedded in event listings and more.
posted by ronofthedead at 2:33 PM on May 23, 2013

Best answer: I actually work for time.ly (and I didn't create an account just for this post, honest!), thanks for the recommendation ronofthedead.

You can download our more feature-rich Standard version for free at our website, and the Pro version is $75/yr with additional features and support, but it's geared more towards event aggregators than creators.
posted by sauril at 2:42 PM on May 23, 2013

I just want to offer a warning about All-In-One Event Calendar. Over the past year I've had two separate clients install it and immediately have memory warnings. It did seem very capable and fairly slick, but it's also very resource heavy, so use it with care.

If you're trying to fit it in with a carefully designed theme, I'd recommend whatever is the most easily styled, and then writing your own CSS.
posted by Magnakai at 4:13 PM on May 23, 2013

I have seen many Wordpress calendar plugins... and unless I lead a sheltered life, I have not seen one that I liked. We use the Google Calendar, which, at the very least, looks as good as any I have seen, and then use a link to provide the actual calender on our website. YMMV... and I know this is a matter of opinion. Here's a link to our site: Aisquith Calendar
posted by brownrd at 5:39 PM on May 23, 2013

Seconding Magnakai - All-In-One Event Calendar is the leading cause of slow MySQL queries on one of my servers. I've also experienced issues after upgrading that may or may not have been features - hard to tell because the changelogs aren't detailed. The developers also stopped pushing new versions to wordpress.org and abandoned their public Trac instance, further complicating debugging.

We're moving to Events Manager, which isn't as attractive by default, but has upgrade-safe templates.
posted by djb at 7:41 PM on May 23, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks all. I took another look at time.ly and it might do the trick as we're more of an event aggregator than creator. I guess I'm a bit surprised there aren't something like "skins" you can place over a pre-existing popular calendar -- though I have no idea how difficult that might be. Anyway, thanks for all the responses.
posted by vecchio at 2:16 PM on May 24, 2013