Multisite–create from child site, but only one calendar?

[Robin]

I’m looking at a project that I think would be well suited to a multisite environment: a nonprofit organization with multiple chapters, each of which needs to maintain its own blog and calendar. However, all events need to be listed on the main calendar as well, and the chapter users need to be able to update the data (and ideally only enter it in one place).

I found this multisite thread which suggests that having one parent calendar is possible, with importing events to the child sites with the aggregator plugin, but our situation differs in that we do need the chapters to be able to add and edit their own events, so wondering if it’s really the correct approach.

Another option I considered is the community events addon (in conjunction with the aggregator?), as long as the chapter users would be able to edit their events, or have all the chapters maintain their own calendars and then use the aggregator (or custom code) to pull the events to the main calendar.

Would very much appreciate any suggestions on a best or preferred approach to this one. Thank you!

[Caroline]

Hi Robin,

Thanks so much for paying us a visit and checking out our plugins! It does sound like you’ve got a bit of a tricky situation here, since bringing events from one The Events Calendar install to another via Event Aggregator would leave individual chapters unable to add or edit their own events on the master calendar, while using Community Events would require chapters to enter each event twice (once on their own calendar and once on the master calendar).

For your intended setup, I’d recommend using Event Aggregator, but rather than having each chapter set up their events on their own chapter’s site to be imported onto the master calendar, I’d set up a Google Calendar for each chapter and have all of the events posted directly to that calendar. Then, using Event Aggregator, you can set up scheduled imports (at whatever interval you prefer) to import from those Google Calendars to both the individual chapter calendars and the master calendars. Scheduled imports will ensure that the events are always kept in sync between the master calendar and chapter calendars, and each chapter will be able to edit their own events via the Google Calendar, with the edits copying over to the WordPress sites with each import. (Note that if you’re maintaining more than 10 sites total between the main site and sub-sites for each chapter, you may need multiple Event Aggregator licenses, but otherwise, one license key should suffice.)

I hope that helps to give you an idea of how this sort of setup might be possible! Let me know if my explanation here makes sense or if you should have any questions about how this arrangement might work! 🙂 Cheers, and thanks again for stopping by!

[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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