I’m in the process of developing a(nother) events calendar plugin for WordPress. I’m trying to get a feel for the optimal UX; I realize that people like to go about things in various ways on their WordPress installments, and I want this plugin to be a natural fit into the way a blog is normally operated … not by some grizzly multi-page addition to the interface.
There are a handle-full of questions I’m dealing with. The most important, is “how do users prefer to post events?” There are two general ways I can imagine a plugin going about this one:
- Create an event from a specific post
- Create a discrete event, separate from the posts … with the option of linking to a post.
The database architecture would be very different foreach() of these scenarios. I think that the second would allow for more control over the calendar itself. For instance, if the calendar features events from all over the place (not your blog), the first scenario would require you to make a post for it anyway. With discrete events, you could feature events without an associated post.
However, a very intimate relationship between events and posts is probably what most users would expect from a ‘native’ WordPress event function.
Of course, there could be both … but that would mean, in theory, two separate ways to go about posting events. It could be a few too many avenues for reaching the same goal. Also, that would be a pain for me to document.
If you’ve got a second, please tell me what you think.
With post_types included in 2.9 and the UI coming in 3.0, it would make the most sense to me to utilize post_types for calendar input. You could easily create your own 'calendar' post_type where it has it's own admin area, so there is no confusion between calendar events administration and posts admin.
I think with post_types and the needed UI that we are going to see a lot of really cool new addons for wp in the near future.
shawn
6 March 2010