 Hello. In this video, we're going to be taking a look at the calendar. Now the first thing I want to say about the calendar is that the one we have installed is pretty rudimentary. Does get the job done, but it's not exactly the most pretty calendar in the world. If you would rather use Google Calendar as your library's calendar or you already are using Google Calendar and you'd like to integrate that into WordPress, just give me a call. Let me know. And there are some things I can do to make that work for you. But for in this video, we are going to talk about the built-in calendar. Now the first thing that you need to know is that we've pre-installed it for you. And I'm going to go ahead and select pages and then all pages. And that will be the list of the default pages that are installed for you. And one of them here is calendar. I'm going to go ahead and click on edit and I'm going to show you this. Now all that you will see here is just this square brackets with the word calendar and all caps. That's what makes the calendar work on this page. You can insert some text above it. You can insert some text below it if you would like. If you remove this bit of text that is here right now, your calendar will disappear. So please do not edit or remove this particular block of text. Like I said, if you want to put something above it or below it, that's okay. Just don't remove that. Then you can find all the rest of what you can do your work on the calendar over here under the calendar menu item. So I'm going to go ahead and select calendar. And the first thing I'm going to do actually is I'm going to select manage categories. One of the things you might want to do before you get started is consider categorizing your items or your calendar events. Let's say you want to categorize them by whether they're adult events or children's events or all ages events. That would be just an example. You can do that here. And so there is a category that's already built in called general. I'm going to go ahead and leave that alone for a second. But I'm going to go ahead here and say kids as a new category. And the hex color here is if you want to say things in this item are going to be red, things in this item are going to be blue. Unfortunately, you can't just type red or blue here. You do have to put in a code. What I would suggest is I'm going to pick a couple that I just know. In fact, I want to just pick some at random. But if you Google hex colors, HEX space colors, you can get a chart of all of the codes that you would need to type in. So in this case, I'm going to go ahead and type FF000. I do believe that is a red color. So I'm going to go ahead and save that. And in fact, yep, there it is, kids and red. I'm going to say adults. And I'm going to call that, I'm going to make that green. And then I'm going to go ahead and say teens. And I'm going to make that blue, which is going to be four zeros and two Fs there. So I now have a general category, a kids, adults, and teens category. Now notice that I can delete the ones I've added. You'll notice that general has to stay. Everything has to be at least in the general category. And then if you want to edit the name of them or what color they are, you notice here we have edits for each one of these. Now you don't have to use categories at all. But if you do, it will behoove you to set up these categories before you actually start putting events into your calendar. So now that I've done that, I'm going to go ahead and select manage calendar on the menu on the left. And this is where you can start putting events into your calendar. Now as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, it's pretty rudimentary. So one thing I do suggest is you keep things kind of short. So let's say, for example, Stephen King is coming to the library. And he will be doing a reading and book signing. And I'm going to leave that in the general category. If I had a web page that provided more information, I could put the URL of that here. In this case, just for fun, I'll put in StephenKing.com just to show you how that works. I'll be putting a start date and an end date. And let's say this is going to happen on Saturday, the 27th of September. And it is going to happen in this case at, let's say, 2 o'clock in the afternoon. And is this going to be a repeating event? Let's say no, it's not. It's just going to happen the one time. So I'm going to go ahead and click save. Now what will happen is it will say event added. It will show in your calendar. And if I scroll on down here, you will see a list of my events showing up now down at the bottom of the page. We go ahead and put in one more story time. Four ages, five to 12, let's say. And I'll correct that O there. And I'm going to say this is a kids event. I'm not going to bother putting a link in there. And let's say we do this every Monday morning at 9 AM. And because it is a weekly event, we're going to say it repeats every one weeks. And I'm going to go ahead and click save there. And it now says the time field must either be blank or entered. So basically what I did here is I forgot to put the zero. Put the zero in for me automatically. Try that save again. And now we have a general event and a repeating kids event. So what is this going to look like on my actual website? Well, what I've done here is I've already pulled up the calendar page. And I'm going to go ahead and refresh that now that I've added some events. And you will see here we have Stephen King. And we have our weekly story time. And if you notice really quickly, as I hover over this, it will show me the time and the brief description. If I hover over this one, time and brief description, which you'll notice these, nothing actually happens. I'm going to go ahead and click on that. And you'll just see the page is just going to reload itself because I did not give it a URL. In this case, if I hover over and click because I put in that stevenking.com, it takes me to the Stephen King website. So you can put very short descriptions into your calendar events. And then you can create a blog post or a whole separate page on your website that you can link to that provides all the information that people will need. Now, the one other thing I want to point out to you about creating events and when I said keeping things short is this is a very long title for an event. And in fact, notice it stopped typing. So it will cut you off at a certain point. And so I'm just going to leave this at this is a very long title. Let's go ahead and say this is a teen event. And we're going to just put it for right now and we'll save it. So now I have that teen event. You'll notice this is a very long title kind of wrapped here. I go back to my page and refresh. You'll see here it kind of wraps really weird. This is a very long title. And especially if you start getting dates with multiple events on it, that your calendar will start to stretch. And it will start to stretch to fit the content you've put in it. So this is where I said it's pretty basic. It does work. Google Calendar takes a lot more effort, but looks a lot prettier, so your call. But try to keep those titles really short. And I think things will look a lot better for you. OK, the last thing I need to talk about is calendar options. Now, there's going to be a separate video that I've already done for you that talks about widgets. Some of these items under calendar options are going to affect the calendar widget. So you might need to cross-reference with that video. The first option here is choose the lowest user group that may manage events. We talked about this in the user's video as to what a level you assign a user. You can say that people of only editors and hire could add events to the calendar. You can say any contributor or hire or just administrators can add. So you need to decide who it is you want to be able to add content to your calendar. Do you want to display author names on the events? If you have multiple people creating events in your calendar, you can have the calendar say who created the event. Don't recommend it, however, just because there is that space limitation that I've already shown you and author names are going to take up space and it won't look as nice. Display a jump box for changing month and year quickly. Notice the default here is no. You can go ahead and change this to yes and then click Save. And now if I go back over to my calendar, you'll see here just this calendar and it has previous and next to allow you to go to previous and next months. But now if I refresh because I changed that option to yes, now we have the previous and next but we've also added a I want to jump to July of 2023 and click Go to jump there. I would say probably not needed. Usually previous and next does a pretty good job. But if you want to do that, you just go ahead and change this display a jump box to yes. The next two options here are display today's events and display upcoming events. This has to do with the calendar widget. There is a widget that you can put into the sidebar of your website that allows people to see the forthcoming events in your calendar without actually going to the calendar. And in the widgets video, I do demonstrate that briefly. In this case, you can choose yes or no for today and yes or no and how far into the future you want that content to be. Enable event categories. Notice this is no by default. If I go back to my calendar and I go back to September 2014, which is where we've actually created some events, you notice everything is the same color. That's because this is no by default. So if I really want to take advantage of those categories and those colors, I go ahead and change this to yes. Click Save. Go ahead and refresh my calendar. And you will now see that there is a color key down at the bottom and there is these colored events. Now, you will also notice that in using bright red and bright blue, that text is very hard to read. So if you are going to use this, go ahead and take a look at one of those hex color charts and pick some lighter colors. Notice this yellow actually kind of works quite well. And you might need to experiment with that because these bright primary colors are going to make pretty much the text useless. The last thing we have here on the calendar options is configuring the style sheet for the calendar. This is actually the CSS code that makes all those colors work and what fonts is being used and what font size is being used and things like that. If you are familiar with CSS, you are welcome to play with this if you want to. If all else fails and you completely screw it up, go ahead and tick this box here and then click Save. And this will reset this all back to the way it was before you started playing with it and will undo any of your changes. If you're not familiar with CSS, absolutely no reason to need to play with this. So that's the basics of the calendar that's built in. Remember GU calendar is an optional. Just drop me a line if you would like to try that instead. And thanks for watching.