Events

The Events component is the hub calendar. It holds events with a start and end time, a category, an optional set of extra pages, and optional registration that collects respondent details. Events appear on the site at /events. This chapter covers the administrator's side; the Hub users book covers browsing, submitting, and registering.

A hub needs this if it runs things people turn up to: a weekly seminar, a summer school, a user meeting. The part that earns its keep is registration — set a Register by date and the event grows a form, the form collects whatever details you switch on, and you can download the list as a spreadsheet the week before. A hub whose events are announced in a mailing list and nowhere else does not need the component at all; leave it alone and /events simply shows an empty calendar.

It is not the group calendar, and it is not a room booking system. Where is free text, there is no capacity limit on registration, and nothing checks for a clash: two events in the same room at the same hour both save without complaint.

Open it in the administrator interface under Components > Events. Three sub-menu links sit at the top left: Events, the list below; Categories, which opens the shared Categories component filtered to Events; and Configuration, the component's own settings screen.

Events

The list is the whole calendar, past and future. Its most useful filter is the group drop-down, because a busy hub's calendar is mostly group events you did not create and cannot usefully edit here.

The Events Manager screen lists every event. Above the list, filter by a search term (matched against titles), a category, or a group, then press Go. The columns are:

Column	Shows
ID	The record's numeric identifier.
Title	The event title, linking to its edit form. An event another administrator has open shows the title as plain text with a "Checked out" tooltip and no checkbox.
Category	The category the event belongs to.
State	Published, Unpublished, Pending (published, but the start date has not arrived) or Expired (published, but the end date has passed). Click it to toggle between published and unpublished.
Timesheet	The From and To dates, or Always / Never when a date is missing.
Access	Public for hub events, or a link to the owning group for group events.
Pages	An "n Page(s)" link to the event's pages.

The columns do not sort; use the filters and the pager at the bottom.

The toolbar offers:

• Options — the component-wide configuration form built from config.xml; see Options below.
• Add Page — with one event checked, opens a new page form for it.
• View Respondents — with one event checked, opens its registration list.
• Publish and Unpublish — change the state of the checked events.
• New — create an event.
• Edit — open the checked event. Clicking a title does the same.
• Delete — remove the checked events. This is permanent, and it also deletes their pages, their respondents, and their tags.
• Help — the built-in help screen.

Creating or editing an event

Say the hub is starting a seminar series and you need next month's talk on the calendar, with sign-up, so the organiser knows how much coffee to order.

1. Go to Components > Events and press New.
2. Fill in Title, pick a Category, and write the talk description into Activity.
3. Put the room in Where and the organiser's address in Contact. The contact text is shown above the registration form as well as on the event page, so make it the address a registrant should write to.
4. Under Publishing, set the Start date and End date, and set Time Zone to the zone the talk is actually held in. Times are stored in UTC and redisplayed in this zone, so a talk entered in the wrong zone is shown at the wrong hour to everyone.
5. Under Registration, set Register by to the Friday before. This is the switch: leave it empty and the event has no Register tab at all.
6. In Registration Fields on the right, turn on Dietary needs and turn off everything the organiser will not read. Every field you leave on is a field every attendee has to get past.
7. Select Save.

The event is live the moment you save it — there is no draft state on this form, and a new event is published immediately. If it is not ready, save it and then press Unpublish in the list.

The week before, tick the event in the list and press View Respondents, then Download CSV to hand the organiser eventrsvp.csv.

The edit screen is titled Event: New or Event: Edit, with Save, Cancel and Help in the toolbar. There is no Save & Close; Save returns to the list.

Event

Field	Notes
Title	Required. Up to 250 characters.
Category	Required. Only categories that belong to Events are listed. At least one must exist, or the form refuses to open.
Activity	The event description, in the editor. Stored as the event's body text.
Where	The location. Up to 120 characters. Email addresses and URLs in it are turned into links.
Contact	Up to 120 characters. An address or a mailto: value becomes an obfuscated mail link. This text is also shown above the registration form as the "For Information Contact" block.
Website	Up to 240 characters. http:// is prepended if you leave the scheme off.
Custom fields	Any custom fields defined on the Configuration screen appear here as text boxes or checkboxes, marked required where configured.
Tags	Comma-separated. Tags connect the event to searches and to other tagged content.

Publishing

Field	Notes
Start date	Date and time the event begins.
End date	Date and time it ends.
Time Zone	The event's own zone, chosen from the full IANA list labelled with its current UTC offset. Times are stored in UTC and always displayed in this zone on the site.

Recurrence appears only for group events, and takes an RRULE string.

Registration

Field	Notes
Register by	The date and time registration closes. Leave it empty and the event has no registration at all: no Register tab appears on the site.
Email	The address registration confirmations are copied to.
Restricted	A password. Set it and visitors must enter it before the registration form is shown — an invite-only event.

The right-hand column shows the event's state, and when and by whom it was created and last modified. Below that, Registration Fields toggles each optional part of the registration form for this event (affiliation, title, address, phone, fax, email, website, position, degree, gender, race, arrival, departure, disability, dietary needs, dinner, abstract with its instruction text, and comments).

Pages

Pages are for the events that need more than a paragraph — a two-day workshop with an agenda, a directions page, and a list of speakers. A single seminar does not need any.

An event can carry extra pages — an agenda, directions, a speaker list — which appear as tabs beside Overview on the event's page on the site. Reach them with Add Page, or by clicking the "n Page(s)" link in the Events list.

The list shows the ID, the title with its alias in parentheses, and reorder arrows. The toolbar has New, Edit and Delete. The page form asks for a Title (required), an Alias (the URL segment; alphanumeric, no spaces) and Page text (required, in the editor), and shows the ordering and creation details beside it.

Respondents

This is the attendee list, and the CSV download is the point of it — see the seminar walkthrough under Creating or editing an event.

View Respondents opens the registrations for the checked event. The list shows each respondent's Name (linking to the full submission), Email, Registered date, Special needs (dietary text and a note when disability contact was requested) and Comment. Search by name with the box above the list.

The toolbar has Download CSV, which returns eventrsvp.csv with the columns Name, Email, Telephone, Affiliation, Arrival, Departure, Disability, Dietary, Dinner and Registered; Delete, which permanently removes the checked registrations; and Cancel.

Clicking a name shows every field the respondent submitted, including affiliation, position, location, phone and fax, website, racial background, gender, arrival and departure, disability and dietary needs, dinner attendance, abstract and comments. Only fields with a value are listed.

Configuration

This is the screen that actually works. Set anything you want to take effect here, not in Options. Half of its settings do nothing either, which the table below marks; the ones that do matter on a hub with a real calendar are Start Page ? and First day.

The Configuration sub-menu link opens the component's own settings, stored separately from the Options form:

Setting	Effect
Admin mail	No effect; the value is stored but never read.
First day	Sunday first or Monday first. Sets the day the week view and the mini calendar start on.
View mail ?	No effect.
View "By" ?	Yes adds a Submitted by row to the event page on the site.
View "Hits" ?	No effect.
Date Format ?	French-English, US or Deutsch. Controls how dates are assembled in the calendar headings.
Use 12hr time Format ?	Yes turns the time boxes on the event forms into 12-hour entry with AM/PM radio buttons.
Start Page ?	Which view /events opens on. Day, Week, Month and Year all work; there is no Categories view in the component, so do not choose it.
No. of Events to List per page…	No effect.

Below that, Custom fields defines up to ten (or more, once ten are filled) extra fields for the event form. Each row takes a Field label, a Type of Text or Checkbox, Required, and Show in listing — which puts the field's value on the event's row in the calendar listing instead of a description excerpt. Custom field values are stored inside the event's description text.

Options

The Options button on the Events list opens a second, older settings form built from config.xml. Every parameter on it is listed in the configuration reference.

The Permissions tab controls who may configure the component (core.admin), access the administrator screens (core.manage), and create, delete, edit, change the state of, and edit their own events. The same actions can be set on categories, and delete, edit and edit state can be set on individual events. On the site, an event's owner may edit or delete it when granted Edit Own, and an event submitted by someone without Edit State is saved unpublished and waits for an administrator to publish it.

API

The component exposes two read-only endpoints: a list of active events and a single event by ID. Both are documented in the API reference.