Building a website for a calendar of events

November 17, 2020 8:13 AM

My mother has asked me to help her make a website with details of local gardens open for charity next year. My level of expertise is ‘built a couple of websites with Wordpress a few years ago but haven’t done anything recently’. If you were me, what platform would you use (Wix? Squarespace? Wordpress?), and what calendar plug-ins would you use, if any?

Obviously the ideal solution would be free, extremely easy to use, and powerful… but I’d be happy with inexpensive, easy to use and pretty good. It might make sense to use Wordpress, where I have at least some experience, but I don’t want to default to it if there’s a better solution.

It’s less important that setting it up (i.e. my job) is very simple, but it would be good if entering all the event details was easy to do, so that she can do it.

posted by Bloxworth Snout to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Wordpress is a fine option. I've used this plugin to import events from an existing Google Calendar (it can take calendar feeds from other sources as well). It's got a lot of configuration options, so there's a bit of trial and error, but I appreciate the fact that it uses an existing, well-known tool. Unlike a lot of other calendar plugins, this digests the data and makes it "native" to WP, rather than sticking an iframe in. The same author has a self-contained alternative that's paid.

I've also looked at this plugin, which is also paid, for a more ambitious project that never got off the ground.
posted by adamrice at 8:35 AM on November 17, 2020

I would use jekyll with a google calendar included as an html iframe and host it for free on github .

Here's an example of what I'm thinking of : Garden Events

I took the calendar from another site that I created a while back but any shared google calendar should work. The rest was from scratch this afternoon. Your mom could edit the calendar events through the google calendar web interface.

If you decide to go this route, you're welcome to use anything that I've done here. If you want any help getting up and running, feel free to contact me via MeFi Mail.
posted by metadave at 5:46 PM on November 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

I've worked for a WordPress development house and when the client wanted something simpler that didn't require hosting and all that, they used Weebly. It's only a few dollars a month if you need more than the free tier. Sadly, I was DevOps so I didn't deal with it much; as such I'm not sure if there's any calendaring ability, but I remember that everyone liked it for the most part and the sites that could be made were pretty darn good.
posted by dozo at 3:29 PM on November 18, 2020

Response by poster: Thanks everyone! I’ll have to think about it but I appreciate the feedback.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 2:33 AM on November 19, 2020

Have fun with your project. I should have mentioned in my earlier answer that the code for the demo that I linked to is at : https://github.com/dc25/gardenEvents/
posted by metadave at 4:26 AM on November 19, 2020