Calendars

In Cascade, you can add a calendar of events to your project that also feeds you events to the central Xavier University calendar located at: www.xavier.edu/calendar.

First, you'll need to have the calendar module added to your project. Contact one of the web developers and we'll copy the module into your project.

Once you have the calendar, you can begin adding events.

Adding Events to Calendar

Click on "Add Content". A new option will appear in your asset menu called "Calendar". Click on the "Calendar" menu option to open up the "Calendar" asset folder menu. Inside, you'll see a content page for "Event". Click on this to add a new event, bringing up the edit screen.

Creating/Editing Event Content

Start by selecting the Placement Folder. Inside your /events/ directory are sub-directories organized by year, and then sub-directories inside of those for each month in that particular year. Select the month/year of your event as the placement folder.

Next, add a Title. This is what gets displayed as your calendar event's heading.

Next is the Category. When you click on this box, it opens up a list of all the available categories. Select all the categories that apply to your event. These are useful for when the user filters events based on these categories. If you want your event to be added to the printable Academic Calendar, be sure to select the Academic Calendar category. Selecting either of the two "Student" categories will add it to the printable Student Category Listing.

Next you need to select your Start and End date/time. Click on those fields will being up a calendar (defaulting to current date). Select your start date and then select the clock at the bottom right to add in the time. You can use the scrolling function, or you can select hours and minutes by clicking directly on the hour and minutes. Then add your end date/time. Below, you will see a check-box for "All Day." If your event is unrestricted by time, select this checkbox. This will remove any time element from your event listing.

Next, you can provide the Location (optional) and any details regarding the event (also optional). You can use the full scope of editing options for your detail including links, images, etc.

After that, there is the Event Image. This is the preview image that will appear in the calendar. If you don't have an image, don't worry. The calendar will use a stock Xavier logo in its place. This can only be an image file (jpg, png, etc) and should be resized to a 150x150 square to better fit the space alotted.

Finally, you can add any contact information, whether it be a person, email, phone number, or website.

Viewing Your Event

Currently, the calendar you see in Cascade is not active. It will not show you the same information that is live. At the moment, its just a placeholder for the magic that happens on the live server. (We hope to have the calendar active in Cascade soon, but currently it's not a priority). In any case, skip to the next step to learn how to push your event and then view it in your calendar.

Publishing Your Event

After adding all of your information, submit your event. This will save it to Cascade and add it to your project calendar. 

Finally, you need to push your event to the live server. This requires publishing BOTH the EVENT you just created AND the INDEX file in the yearly folder you placed the event.

For example, if you create an event for December of 2019, you will need to push the event you just created AND the index file within the /2019/ directory. Or better yet, publish the entire /2019/ directory at once to push both files.

Doing this pushes the event to the live server, adding it to the project calendar.

The easiest method would be to simply publish the entire /events/ folder. This will ensure that any and all events get published to the live server.

After you've published, you'll need to wait 30 seconds or so as the everything gets pushed to the live server. Then just go and visit the live calendar to see the changes.

"But What About the University Calendar?"

Every hour, the main University Calendar publishes the necessary files to pull in all of the events from every calendar within xavier.edu. So if you don't see your event added right away, wait an hour and it should be there.