The Event Form

The most generic (and least useful) way to create a new event is to click the Add an Event button link in the block of buttons at the bottom of the calendar. It will only be visible when a user with sufficient privileges is logged in. The resulting page contains a form with all the information you may want to store in that event. The same form is used for editing events that already exist. The form contains:

• The month, day, and year of the event's Date.
• The Title for the event.
• Text that will show up on the event details page or in Event List View. Note that this text can be formatted using the rules of PHP Markdown Extra. See the PHP Markdown web site for the simple rules you can use to format event text.
• The Start Time, with separate places for hour and minute, as well as a drop-down for AM and PM. There are Javascript-powered spinner arrows for these, so that you can increase or decrease the numbers in each entry space. If you enter the time in 24-hour format, you can leave the AM/PM drop-down menu alone.
• The End Time, with the same spaces as for the Start Time.
• A checkbox for "All Day" events, which don't have a time associated with them.
• A Category drop-down (see below for the New Category: entry in this menu.)
• A blank space for creating a new category. In order to use this, the Category drop-down menu should be set at New Category: .

Creating Events

In Calendar View, when a user with sufficient privileges is logged in, new events can be created for a certain date by clicking the number of that day on the calendar. This conveniently puts the date in question into the appropriate fields on the event form. The rest is up to you.

In Event List View, there is no similar mechanism, because the dates that appear depend upon the events already in the database.

Copying Events

New events can also be created by copying existing events. When you see the copy icon (), clicking it will allow you to copy the associated event. It shows you a page similar to the event editing form, but with a different purpose. The top of the page lists some data from the event you wish to copy, and the bottom allows you to specify what kind of copying you wish to do.

• The Repeat: drop-down box allows you to select from a variety of ways your event might be copied, as follows:

  • Single will copy your event to exactly one date.
  • Daily will copy your event to another date, and every day in between.
  • Monthly on Day will copy your event to multiple months between the original event and the target date, creating the copies on the same day of the month as the original event. For example, an original event on the fourth Tuesday will result in new events on the fourth Tuesday. The new events will only be created between the date of the original event (exclusive) and the target date (inclusive).
  • Monthly on Date will copy your event to the same day of multiple months between the original event and the target date. The new events will only be created between the date of the original event (exclusive) and the target date (inclusive).
  • Annually will copy your event to the same month and day, each year between the original event's date (exclusive) and the target date (inclusive).

• The Repeat Skip: field is only useful for the repeating types of event copying. It allows you to specify a number of matching dates that will be skipped between new dates that will be created. For example, using Daily would normally put new events every day between the original event and the target date, inclusive of the target date. You can change that to every other day by setting Repeat Skip: 1, because one day will be skipped between each new event. For every third day, use 2, and so forth. The same principle can be applied to the other repeat types.

• The heading Repeat on/until: specifies the target date as described above.

• The Make Copies Related: checkbox, if checked, will cause all of the copies to be related to the original event. If the original event is already related to others, then the new ones will also be related to the same group. If not, then they will form a new related group of events. See the Related Events page for more details about them.

Editing Events

If you are logged in with sufficient privileges, you can edit an existing event in Calendar View by clicking the event title to see the Javascript menu of icons, and then clicking the Edit icon (). (If Javascript is not enabled, you can also edit the event by clicking the time on events that have a time.)

In Event List View, the edit icon will always be visible for users with sufficient privileges.

The same event form used to create events is also used to edit them, only now it will be filled with all the data for the event you're editing.