Importing Calendar events

The web site calendar should become the central point for sharing schedules throughout the organisation, with many different people contributing new events.

Events are associated with groups, for example on a church web site a Sunday Morning meeting should be entered in a "celebrations" group and made visible to everyone, whilst small group meetings are specific to the "group members" and so should be entered in the relevant group and made visible to members of that group only. Entering events in the correct group enables users to view only the events that are most relevant to them. 

However, (and this is the reason why this method of event creation is not recommended) when you're importing events, events which would normally be entered into the system as a linked series of events in the Hubb calendar are created as single, unconnected, events.

Consequently, if you needed to change e.g. the time of an imported Alpha Course, you'd have to change each event in the series individually rather than in a one change changes all action. Similarly, if you wanted to delete a 'series' of events which had been imported like this, you'd need to do each one individually.

Also, if you ever use the Resource bookings feature (equipment, rooms), this would be a major hindrance to efficiency as you can normally book resources for series of events in one go, whereas this would require doing each as a separate resource booking – very laborious for all concerned, so just something worth bearing in mind :-)  Similarly, you can add a series of events to a rota, but if these are imported events they would need to be added manually.

Adding Events

Events can be added individually into the system or you can import an existing calendar (e.g. if you already have information stored in Outlook) through an import wizard from within the Web Office.

The fields available when importing are as follows:

Title
Start Date
Start Time
End Date
End Time
All Day Event?
Description
Location
Postcode

For help with adding events read the calendar documentation.

The 'Contact' field

One other thing re importing: The Contact field (i.e. who to contact for further info) is not supported (external data sources don't use this), so this is set by default to the email address of the person importing, which may not be what you want.

One workaround (so you don't personally end up with all the enquiries) is to create a "Church Office" (name) user with a generic office@yourdomain.org (or whatever generic address you use), give that user full permissions and then log in as them and do the import, thus the church office address will be the contact on those events.

Exporting Events

Your site calendar can now be exported as an icalendar feed which enables you to import your web site events into many email clients e.g.Outlook or Google calendar and view them alongside your personal calendar, or staff office calendar.