Looking for a calendar…

[Chris M.]

Hi,

We’re a public school district (K-12), and are looking to replace our current WP calendaring system. Here’s our current setup:

1) District site is on a multisite installation where the different departments are the sub-sites. Only the main site uses the calendar.
2) School sites are on a second multisite installation where each school is its own sub-site and its own calendar.
3) We need to make sure the calendar is accessibility friendly; federal law requires public schools to have WCAG AA compliancy.
4) All calendars need to pull events from Office 365 calendaring (Outlook) via multiple feeds. (Is there a feed import limit of any sort?)
5) It would be *very* helpful if the school calendars could pull events in a continuous feed from the district calendar, as our current calendar setup (All-in-One Events Calendar) does generate a feed for each event category, and the full calendar, and we use that feature.
6) Piggy backing on item 5, patrons are subscribed to our district calendar, and it would be very helpful if they could subscribe to our district calendar without having to go back in every month to re-import the events on their own calendars.
7) What would the cost be for me to execute this setup on our public school sites?

Having gone through the site, I’m not too hopeful on 5 & 6, but really would wish that to be a functionality.

Thanks in advance for your time.

[Barry]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your interest in our plugins!

To kick things off, you can certainly try out The Events Calendar – our free, core calendaring plugin – and take it for a spin to test out some of the scenarios you have described. It’s multisite-friendly and you ought to have no difficulty installing it on either network (or within staging/test sites you might have) 🙂

With regards to some of your more specific questions:

We need to make sure the calendar is accessibility friendly; federal law requires public schools to have WCAG AA compliancy

Unfortunately we cannot guarantee this at present, but accessibility is nonetheless something we take seriously and are making great strides toward. The Events Calendar – and, in fact, all of our plugins – are highly customizable so corrections to meet specific targets within the context of your deployment are a real possibility.

All calendars need to pull events from Office 365 calendaring (Outlook) via multiple feeds. (Is there a feed import limit of any sort?)

Support for importing event data from iCal feeds (and a plethora of other sources/formats) is provided by Event Aggregator. This is a service you can subscribe to that requires no additional plugins except The Events Calendar itself.

It would be *very* helpful if the school calendars could pull events in a continuous feed from the district calendar, as our current calendar setup (All-in-One Events Calendar) does generate a feed for each event category, and the full calendar, and we use that feature.

Using the above service (Event Aggregator), plus the latest release of The Events Calendar, yes! You can pull data from other installations of The Events Calendar at regular intervals.

Piggy backing on item 5, patrons are subscribed to our district calendar, and it would be very helpful if they could subscribe to our district calendar without having to go back in every month to re-import the events on their own calendars.

The Events Calendar exposes ‘export’ buttons (links to iCal feeds, in essence) that can be used in just this manner 🙂

What would the cost be for me to execute this setup on our public school sites

Based on your description, it sounds like The Events Calendar (completely free) would solve a number of problems for you.

In this case, it sounds like you would also require Event Aggregator – for its import capabilities – which is an affordable service with various tiers of licensing. It’s hard for me to suggest exactly which license you would require, but the following resources could potentially help you to form your own estimate there:

• The Event Aggregator product page outlines the different licensing options
• This knowledgebase article covers how import limits work and how they are calculated

I hope that helps, but please do let me know if I can offer any further guidance.

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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