Calendar
An event calendar that outlives your website
If you run a venue, the calendar is the page customers actually use, and the one that's always out of date. This one lives beside your site instead of inside it. It works on WordPress, Shopify, or plain HTML, staff update it themselves, and it keeps working when you change everything else.
Where it's running
Event calendar · Petaluma
Griffo Distillery
Before. A tasting room that hosts bands, food trucks, trivia, and ticketed events several nights a week. The manager kept the master schedule in iCloud and retyped it into a page on the Shopify site. Ticketed events lived in Eventbrite, separately. The page went stale between updates; “closed the first two weeks of January” was still up in February.
After. A standalone calendar that drops into the Shopify site with one script tag. Staff add or edit an event in a login-protected admin page and it’s live in about 90 seconds. Paste an Eventbrite link and the details fill themselves in. The calendar also publishes iCal and RSS feeds, so the same events show up in Google Calendar and on partner sites.
The distillery is switching site platforms this year. The calendar doesn’t care. It sits beside the site, not inside it, so it survives the rebuild untouched.
The calendar you have now
Six things venues and nonprofits have told me, and what's different here.
“The calendar plugin is what’s killing the site.”
On WordPress the calendar is usually the heaviest thing on the page and the reason the site can’t be left alone: a few hundred events and every page view is a database query the server can’t keep up with. The plugin itself is now sold as a bundle, Pro from $149 a year before add-ons. Source: EventKoi
Here: The calendar runs beside your site, not inside it. Your page just displays it. Nothing on your server does any work.
“Every useful feature is an add-on.”
Importing events. A second view. A form so staff or partners can submit an event. Recurring events. Each is a separate paid module, so the calendar stays half-configured because the rest costs too much.
Here: Imports, views, a submission form with approval, recurring events, and feeds are all included. There is no add-on price list.
“Eventbrite is for tickets, not for our website.”
Ticketed events live in Eventbrite. Bands, food trucks, trivia, and closures don’t, because nobody pays a ticketing fee to list a free night. So someone retypes the rest by hand and the two drift apart.
Here: Paste an Eventbrite link and the title, time, and poster import for you to check, ticket link included. Free events go in the same calendar through the same form.
“We’re trying to get off Time.ly.”
Hosted calendar services change their pricing, drop the free tier, add their branding, and keep your events inside their account. Leaving usually means rebuilding the calendar from scratch.
Here: Your events are plain files in a repository you own, and they publish as iCal, RSS, and JSON feeds. Leaving is never a rebuild.
“The Google Calendar embed looks like a spreadsheet.”
No posters, no ticket links, no styling, and it still needs someone with the Google login to make a change. It works for a staff schedule. It doesn’t sell a Friday night.
Here: Poster cards, ticket buttons, and colors and fonts set to match your site. Google Calendar still gets a feed, so the staff schedule stays in sync.
“Our events are on Facebook and nowhere else.”
Facebook is a poor permanent home for a schedule. People without an account may never see the events, past listings drop out of view, and your own site gains no searchable history of what you do.
Here: Paste the Facebook event link and it imports for you to check. The event gets a real page on your calendar that stays findable after the night is over.
Also
- Styled to match. Month, list, and poster-card views in your colors and fonts.
- Feeds out. iCal, RSS, and JSON, so the same events show in Google Calendar, on partner sites, and in newsletters.
- Nothing to maintain. No plugin, no database, no server. Your events are files you own.
Pricing
Included in Host for venues. For a site TLC doesn't host: $35 a month, or $350 a year, on any platform, submissions and feeds included. There is no add-on price list.