WordPress Events Plugin

This article explores a number of freely available events plugins for WordPress.

• Events: this is a great plugin for a simple event system. It creates a new area in your dashboard where you can add, edit and manage event. It provides a number of boxes for you to fill in, like Date, Times, Location. It also provides a ‘free content’ WYSIWYG box to write other details, although this box does not work with the qTranslate plugin activated.
• Events Manager: a very full featured plugin with numerous settings and ability to handle bookings. Great for a site with lots of events, but a bit over the top if you only have a small number of events, as it’s quite complicated to set up and adds a lot of filter options to your events page.
• All-in-one- Event Calendar: a richly featured plugin that is more user-friendly than Events Manager. It uses the familiar Posts system to add/edit events, but adds additional boxes for Date, Location , etc. It integrates nicely with iCal and also has the option to incorporate Google Maps. It creates a nice looking AJAX list of events on your page. But sadly, again, it does not play well with qTranslate, bringing the language code into your calendar.
• The Events Calendar: Integrates fully with the Posts system, again adding boxes for things like Date, Location, etc. It’s not obvious from installing it how to create an Events page. Comes with unstyled widget, that unfortunately, again, does not work well with qTranslate.
• Simple Events Calendar: a handy, very light-weight events plugin. Easy to use, but not easy to use with qTranslate because it does not use the Posts system.
• Event Calendar / Scheduler: don’t even go there!

I was surprised to discover how difficult it was to find a suitable events plugin, especially one that would work with my favoured language plugin. I opted for Events Manager as it works well with qTranslate, although I had to accept a limitation – the event description would display in all my site’s languages. It’s worth getting to grips with its complexities, but it’s not for the faint-hearted!