📅

How to add a calendar to PlaceCal

ℹ️
To populate your PlaceCal site with events, you need to add a calendar. A calendar belongs to a partner, and when it is imported, any events you have saved in it will also belong to that partner. When you save a calendar on PlaceCal, you can choose how you want to assign location information to its events.

Calendar settings

First log in to PlaceCal, then click the button labelled “add new calendar”.

Then fill in the fields as below:

Partner Organiser

Make sure your organisation is selected from the dropdown list there.

Name

You can give your calendar any human-readable name you like here. This should be one that will make sense to you later, in case you add multiple calendars and want an easy way to tell them apart.

URL

This is where to put the organiser URL you created previously. It’s the feed PlaceCal can take your events from. Whenever you add new events to the source calendar, PlaceCal will pick them up.

Importer Mode

Leave this set to Auto, unless you know what you’re doing!

Location

This determines how the location for each event is determined.

  • Event where possible: Use the address from each event. If the address is invalid or it doesn't have one, use the calendar's default location.
  • Event: Use the address from each event. If an address is invalid or it doesn't have one, the event will import with no location.
  • Default location: Always use the calendar's default location.
  • Room number: Get a room number from the event's address, and overwrite the rest of the address with the calendar's default location.
  • No location: Discard any address information.
  • Online only: Discard any address information but retain web links.

Contact information

None of this is compulsory, it depends entirely on what you want to share. The information on the left (Public Contact), will show to anyone looking at your events on PlaceCal. The information on the right (Partnership Contact), will only be visible to PlaceCal developers - it’s there in case we need to contact you about this calendar for any reason.

🥇
All done! Click “Create Calendar” at the bottom of that page, and fix any validation errors you might have. PlaceCal will queue it for import, though it may take a few minutes to start showing.

Where do events show up?

Events are automatically displayed on PlaceCal sites. Events will show on sites when:

  • The event’s calendar belongs to a partner who is shown on that site
  • The event’s address is within a neighbourhood that is shown on that site (and it’s a place based site)
  • The event’s address matches the name and postcode of a partner who is shown on that site

How are events connected to partners?

Events can be connected to partners in two ways:

  • They are automatically connected to the partner the calendar belongs to. This is partner is shown on an event as being the ‘Event organiser’
  • They will be optionally connected to a partner if they have the partner’s name and postcode saved in their address, and if that partner has consented to accepting event connections. By default, partners will not be connected to events, but you can opt your partners into this by ticking this ‘can be assigned events’ box on the partner form. Events will only be matched up to partners whose name is found in the events’ address, and who have the same postcode as the event.
    • image