Managing online calendars and event registration can present a huge challenge. Without a dynamic system, the task is nearly impossible. Generating the HTML re- quired to display a calendar and all the various presentation options (day, week, month views, and so on) is unreasonable; and worse, because the events are time-sensitive, remembering to update “next” or “upcoming” event lists can be onerous. Nothing looks worse than having last week’s meeting listed first on your Upcoming Events page.

Even with dynamic systems, you tend to be constrained to certain parameters with fixed options. However, by taking advantage of the flexibility of Drupal and building on the powerful base of Views, you can accommodate nearly any variation on event listings for your site. This series will introduce the following Date, Calendar, and Flag modules to show you how you can build a custom event site quickly and easily. This is part of the O'Reilly Using Drupal book guide, and you can use the Using Drupal, 2nd Edition book to follow along with this series.

The series begins with our case study for the Aurora Book Club, and then walks through creating an event content type, and using the Views module to display our events in several different ways, including a calendar view, list view, and an iCal export. Once we have the main event features in place, we will also take a look at how to use the Flag module to allow members to mark attendance for events. We wrap up by creating a view of the attendees per event, which is added as a tab to each event node.

See our guide Using Drupal Book by O'Reilly Media to access all of our tutorials related to this book. Each series covers a chapter (or appendix).