My developer installed The Events Calendar plugin for WordPress on Lowell.com, and it’s the best calendar I’ve used. On the home page, I have the upcoming events listed on the upper right, and I have upcoming and past event pages within the site. Each event listing has its own page, allowing easy Google indexing, which is beneficial and sticky. The calendar I previously used did not do this, and that was a setback.
In terms of search engine optimization, the calendar integrates nicely with the All in One SEO plugin I have installed on the site, so each event has good SEO practices built in to it. Additionally, events are easy to add simply by using the post functionality built into the WordPress platform.
My developer was able to make some customizations to the plugin both in terms of appearance and performance. For instance, the website field on each event is now “no follow,” so the site doesn’t leak the “link juice” that may have hurt the site’s rankings. In addition, people can add photos and images within the event listing, making it more appealing. Here’s a sample listing for a Cinco de Mayo Fundraiser.
One of the best things about the plugin has to be the support of the plugin creators. I ran into a minor issue with the appearance of events in the calendar, and when I contacted Shane and Peter, they put me in touch with two of the key developers Justin and Kelsey, and Kelsey was able to troubleshoot and solve the problem quickly.
You don’t always see great support with WordPress plugins, but these guys were great. If you need an Event Calendar plugin on your WordPress website, I highly recommend The Events Calendar plugin.
nice tip on the calendar plugin… looks like one I should try out for sure… THANKS.
It’s a great plugin and very easy to work with. It requires some basic CSS knowledge to adjust the style to your sites’ theme but that is not too difficult as well.
Can you let us know how you got the plug in to work? The plug-in without modification breaks themes designed for 2.9+.
Can you post the work around?
Thanks.
Brian,
I’m not sure if this is an appropriate answer for you but this way I learned how to change the style by using the firefox ‘Firebug’ plugin tool;
Once the tool is installed, go to a site that uses “The Events Calendar” plugin and by using the tools’ ‘css’ buttons, click inside the text of the calendar on the site. In the window that appeared below your browser, you will see the part of the css file where this part of the calendar text has been styled. Using Lowell.com as an example, it looks like this:
.month, .date {
color:#F78743;
font-size:12px;
font-weight:bold;
}
All you have to do now is to copy these lines into your own style.css file and adjust the values to match your sites theme.
Of course, this is just a workaround for someone who doesn’t know much about css like myself, but it works.
Cheers
I just looked at the code on lowell.com and the website links have a the parameter ref=”no follow” where you want it to be ref=”nofollow”.