Event Management Calendar for Drupal?

Question

I run a church website and we have an event calendar page. We've been using Google Calendar for this - but there isn't a way to make everyone have the same default calendar - so some people are adding entries to their personal calendars and these are never showing up on the public calendar. I've been thinking about moving to either a hosted or a drupal solution (the site itself is drupal). I can't believe the process it takes to get a calendar up and running using the Date / Calendar modules. I'm wondering if there is an easier way to do this (with Drupal) or if anyone can recommend alternative systems that might be a better fit?

Answer 1

If you feel unconfortable with Drupal's philosophy of "many small highly focused modules together make applications (aka the Unix way)" you are, indeed best off not seeking your solution in Drupal.

The Drupal Way, would be to install CCK, Date and Views. These come with a lot of example views, and documentation that make running an even-calendar possible. Agreed, it is not easy, it is not a turnkey solution. But this is the way Drupal prefers things to be handled.

However, on top of Drupal you can run a system like "features". Such a feature is actually a bundle of many dependencies and portable pre-configurations. In other words: you enable the "calendar" feature: and boom: you have a views, CCK and Date-based calendar, but turnkey. I am not aware of a public "feature" for calendars. And would think that running "features" on top of your Drupal is rather complex at the moment.

You may, however, want to look at the Drupal-based distribution OpenAtrium, which uses features extensively to run calendars, wiki, and so on.