Greenhouse 2.0 Calendar
We’ve just posted the latest in our little featured video series: the new calendar.
Everything has been updated and polished, and I think you’ll agree that we’ve upped the level of quality in this new version. There’s also a major new feature available: repeating events. We know that it was one of the most annoying things left out of the original greenhouse, and we’re really happy about the fact that you’ll never need to update 35 events again when something like your Sunday Service time changes.
There are also a bunch of little improvements: events now sort by time correctly, email addresses turn into links, you can specify start and end times, and have events that span multiple days. And you can also now link an event’s location to a map. And like the new media player, you have a lot more control over the color scheme!
Here’s a walkthrough of the new calendar:
12 Comments
I was wondering how events will look over multiple days on the calendar. Will they be individual dots on each day, or will it span the course of days?
Hey Dustin – that’s a great question. We originally designed it so events that spanned multiple days would display as a line across those days. But as we got into developing it, we realized that those lines caused a lot of complicated problems that honestly we just didn’t have enough time to solve.
The repeating event feature was actually the same way – I knew it would be complicated, but I had no idea just how complicated until we actually started it! But for that one we plugged through because we know how important it is.
It’s weird how you take a feature like that for granted because Outlook and iCal have been doing it for years… but I guess they actually had a team of people for that one specific piece!
Hey Ben, it looks great! The style is nice and simple. One question: is there any way it can sync with Google Calendar? We currently use that across all our ministries, and it’d be awesome if we could streamline everything.
Hey Jeremiah – right now we’re not going to be syncing with Google Calendar or iCal, but we may consider doing it in the future. If you want to use google calendar for your site, you can have it open in a new window so it replaces the built-in calendar. It’ll look like google calendar instead of the clover one, but it will allow you to update everything in one place.
Hey with the repeating events. If there is a week when there might be an exception to the repeating event. Like, for example, you take a week off of youth group for Christmas. Can you make an exception to a repeating event, or delete just one occurance of a repeating event without affecting the others?
@Eric – yep, definitely. We tried to jump through all the hoops for you so everything just works the way you’d expect it to. When you edit (or delete) a repeating event, it’ll ask you if you want to edit/delete just that occurrence or all the future ones.
Hey Ben – I’ve gotta repeat Jeremiah’s comments a bit. We’re using Church Community Builders and hope to become a new Clover user in the coming weeks. We would love to be able to fully integrate our church calendar into our Clover site without having to repeat it or link it to an external site. Could we gain the ability to use an I-Frame Link or I-Cal in the near future.
Hey Jason – yeah, you can absolutely put your google calendar on your site. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear. On your frontend site, the experience would be the same as it is for the built in calendar: your visitors would click a link and the calendar would open in a new window. And for your editing purposes, you would just put all your events in your google calendar and just forget about the built in one.
The ability to do that has always been a part of Clover. The one thing that you can’t do (yet) is to have the built in calendar pull in all your events from your google calendar. We personally don’t think it’s a big deal since you can just integrate the full functionality of google calendar anyway. Make sense?
Just a question: What happened to the Media Player Part 2 video? Did i miss it somewhere? The suspense on all this is killing me. Can’t wait for 2.0!!!
@Anthony We’re actually just about to publish the part two for the media player, so stay posted!
We’re looking at buying a Clover site soon. I have to re-repeat the calendar comment. We know you can use your google calendar and link it, but on an all flash site, an external google calendar link is a graphic eyesore, whereas your calendar fits the theme brilliantly. It would be incredibly convenient because it can also link to our facebook page (and anything else) and it allows us to update all calendars from one interface. There is no good looking way to use a google calendar that I know of with your site…there are some for joomla but I believe they are joomla specific. Do you have any suggestions for how we can integrate it in an aesthetically pleasing manner?
@Joel We feel your pain! Syncing our calendar is definitely something we would love to do here at Clover, but unfortunately there are so many complications trying to integrate this feature. So far Google has been a great secondary resource, even though it isn’t the best fit aesthetically. Keep in mind you can always link to any other online calendar that allows you to share with a URL address!