New PDD Calendar is up and running today

Paul Lundgren Apr 17, 2016 4 Comments

The new design of the PDD Calendar launched today. There are still a few elements to it that we will be cleaning up over the next few weeks, but it’s time to just let it rip and put it into service.

Why did we switch? When we launched the previous version of the PDD Calendar in 2011 there weren’t any good WordPress plugins for the type of event calendar we wanted. So we built our own. As the years went on, WordPress plugins surpassed our ability to innovate — or at least find the time to innovate — and our calendar was also in need of a design change to match the responsive design of our blog, adjusting to various screensizes for optimal viewing on iPhones and tablets. We decided to make this change over a year ago; finally got around to it now.

Feel free to begin complaining or complimenting the new calendar in the comments, or call/email. Mention problems if you see them, and we’ll either fix them or explain why what you think is broken is really just the best we can do.

We anticipate you will think the new calendar can’t do things the old calendar did, but once you get used to the new navigation you will see that it does. Pretty much every feature the old calendar had the new calendar has, except for the one thing we are working on and the one thing we haven’t thought of. Please tell us about that thing we haven’t thought of.

Have you submitted an event to the old calendar and now you can’t find the event listed in the new calendar? Yes, you probably have. Don’t worry, we have the data and are working on it. There is a backlog of 128 submitted events for the calendar staff to push out. We will get to them all. Probably slowly.

Why is my PDD Calendar RSS feed all screwed up? Because things have changed and we’re not sure yet if we can get it working again.

So, how many events get published in the PDD Calendar? Well, the old calendar was retired after listing 33,879 events from May 12, 2011 to April 18, 2016 (although it was in demo mode from May 12 to Sept. 12, 2011). That’s more than 6,000 per year, or slightly less than 20 per day on average. We intend to crush those numbers in the future.

Events PDD Shop Talk

4 Comments

Paul Lundgren

about 8 years ago

The first question we received via email was about viewing events weeks and months off into the future.

"I use it regularly, especially using the calendar to pick the best date for events that have a longer run so it does not conflict with another event and even for looking ahead for being out of town or for having people visit. Navigation for those purposes escaped me. Is it possible in an easy way as it was previously?"

It's basically the same process as with the old calendar, it just looks a bit different. Here is the way it looked on the old calendar:



On the new calendar, there is a filter running across the top of the list of events on the calendar's home page. At the left side of the filter is the option to pop out the date selector:



Just click in the EVENTS FROM / Date area to show the selector. You can choose a day from any point in the future to see the events for that day. At this point we don't have anything listed in 2019 or beyond yet, but there are a few 2018 events listed.

Cory Fechner

about 8 years ago

The new calendar has a nice feature the old calendar did not have.  The View As settings allow you to change how you browse/view events. You can view by day, list, week, month, map view and image view. The map view is a great way to visually see, by proximity, what is going on around town by viewing event pins on a Google map, click the pins to see the event details.

Cory Fechner

about 8 years ago

The search filters are another great way to find events more specific to your interests or preferences. You can filter by category, event cost, venues and more.   Choosing a venue in the venue filter will allow you to browse the calendar and only see events at venues you selected.  You can set the cost filter to $0 and only see FREE events going on around town while you browse the new calendar.

Cory Fechner

about 8 years ago

You can easily submit your events to the new calendar by selecting "Submit an Event" from the calendar drop down menu.

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