Joomla Event Calendar Modules:

Joomla 1.6 does not have a built-in event calendar module so you have to find one to install. Joomla.org has a list of available event calendars. Since my group is working with version 1.6 and we are students, we are limited to choosing Non-Commercial modules that also have a 1.6 Native version of the module. There is really only one choice, GCalendar, But I will mention all four here.

GCalendar:

GCalendar is the only choice at this time, in my opinion, because it’s free, it works with version 1.6, and it has a rating of 4.35 out of 5.00 from 146 users and has 210 favored votes. It was added to Joomla February 11, 2007 so it has had time to have the bugs worked out of it. Users who left comments say that it’s easy to install, easy to setup, and has a nice appearance.

One commenter for GCalendar stated, “I had this set up in minutes, this is much better than several of the commercial calendars on the front end.” The same commenter then described his problem with the module, “The only disadvantage of this is that if you want to have administrators manage the calendar they will need to do it from Google Calendars.” So, now we know what the G stands for.

Features:

Easy configuration, CSS based customization and performance gains through AJAX and advanced caching mechanism are the main targets of this extension.

The whole suite contains different extensions which are listed here:

* The component is the heart of the GCalendar suite and shows different kinds of calendars in the main part.
* The Upcoming Events module shows the next events of your calendar as a list.
* The GCalendar module shows the google calendar at a module position.
* The Next module shows a countdown timer till the next events starts.
* The search plugin adds the functionality to search for events.
* The next plugin embeds upcoming events into articles.

PHP Quick Calendar E:

PHP Quick Calendar E is my second choice for an event calendar because it has a rating of 4.17 out of 5.00 from 6 users and has 4 favored votes. There are six reviews on this one. The previous module has 89 reviews and the other two modules have 0 and 1 respectively. We do have to take into consideration that Joomla 1.6 is new and therefore any modules for the 1.6 version are also going to be new. This module was added on April 1, 2011. In the notes section, an error is mentioned that can disrupt the whole page layout, Yikes.

One review stated, “It looks good, very easy to install and customize, but I get a bug on event, when I try to record one event for one week the end date restore to 00-00-0000 when I save.” I’m not exactly sure what this means but it can’t be good. The reviewers gave high stars but they were all fairly specific in what they were complaining about.

Features:

* An event calendar
* Easy to use
* Based on the popular PHP Quick Calendar with extra functionality
* Able to display recurring events daily, weekly, monthly, annually
* Currently, only has the standard and small views
* An optional module for displaying the small view is also provided
* Can be customized using (the component) template overrides
* Comes with a translation into Spanish and Dutch, for the backend and frontend

Calendar FX:

While this module has no reviews, it does have a rating of 5 out of 5.00 from 4 users and 6 favored votes. It was added November 11, 2010 and is Flash based. It is however useable without any knowledge of Flash. I rank this one lower than the previous module because it has 4 users who gave a rating even though it has been viewed 24793 times compared to the PHP Quick Calendar E which has 6 users who gave a rating with 8723 views. Both modules lack the popularity of GCalendar which has 146 users who gave a rating with 485492 views.

Features:

* You can integrate it in any website for free without any Flash knowledge
* You can modify the calendar's width and height
* There are multiple background and shade properties
* The text is HTML/CSS formatted
* There is the ability to change skin for info box (event day)
* The features for cells/days are customizable
* Other options are available on the Live Demo

Spider Calendar Lite:

This module is the lite version of a Commercial module, which students are not going to buy for a school project. There is one reviewer and he or she gave it a rating of 1 out of 5.00 and no favored votes. There have been 2443 views and this module was added on April 3, 2011, so maybe we just need to give it some time to evolve. That one reviewer stated, “I installed this calendar and got all the module titles removed by it. Cloud text on the calendar does not show on some templates. Still needs some work done, maybe on the next release it will be better.”

Features:

* Spider Calendar Lite is a highly configurable Joomla extension which allows you to have multiple organized events in a calendar
* You can create as many events as you need for a day
* With a simple click on the date you will see the events and their descriptions recorded for that day