VCUarts Calendar 2.0 Roadmap / 08-09-2016
System Requirements
- Daily and Calendar views should be cleanly displayed.
- Calendar should be filterable by: Event Type, Date, Department
- Category filters should be clear and defined, in some way (Performance, Screening, Visiting Artists, Lectures/Talks, Exhibition, Alumni, Faculty Happenings)
- Searchable by title and description content.
- Expired events should show up in search results that do not have a search query or when a users explicitly searches for archived events. Old events should be appropriately labels as "expired".
- Calendar should incorporate visuals / graphics with each event post.
- Calendar should have push/pull functionality that allows departments to pull feeds specific to them.
- Calendar should support multiple users and varying role levels.
- Calendar should have a visual, featured events section that gets curated on a weekly basis.
- Automatically generated Events newsletter
- Ability to generate a press release skeleton
- Pre-populated list of venues so as to not have multiple spelling variations
- Customizable RSS / iCal / etc feeds for users to plug into whichever calendar app they use
- Require a cost to be listed or Free if so
- Improved social sharing, field for hashtag of event if applicable
- Field for press release upload if exists
Options Available
A: Hiring freelance developer to assist in implementation
Concerns being time associated with familiarizing outside developer with our development workflows, School of the Arts processes, cost and ongoing maintenance. A freelance developers rate for this type of work will start around $80/hour and would most likely be $100-$120/hour. On going maintenance of the codebase would then be done by our internal team who could run into roadblocks with an unfamiliar codebase. Another concern is the communications web team focus shifting from development to managing this outside developer. Reviewing code, deploying to servers, testing, etc. Possibly only adding time and expense to the project.
B: Off the shelf solution
The needs of the School of the Arts have always been unique, requiring our own internal IT team, communications team and branding for example. Finding an off the shelf solution that just works out of the box seems unlikely. Hiring an agency to totally develop a custom built solution would most likely be the most expensive option, require constant back and forth with feedback and maintenance of this solution would still fall on our internal team going forward.
C: In House with some help via extensions / plugins
Currently we make use of a WordPress plugin called Events Calendar Pro which is developed by a well respected WordPress development shop Modern Tribe. I would like to recommend expanding our license from a single site (arts.vcu.edu/calendar) to a multisite version which means this same calendar plugin, interface, workflow would be made available on all department sites. This also means the main calendar can easily pull in and aggregate department events with no extra work required of department site maintainers. Critical security updates would be applied via WordPress updates, a process thats a daily part of the web teams duties. Modern Tribe also offers additional premium extensions for their calendar plugin that could help quickly check many of our requirements off.
- Improved Filtering: https://theeventscalendar.com/product/wordpress-events-filterbar/
- Importing community calendars and improving pull of department calendars or other VCU entities: https://theeventscalendar.com/product/ical-importer/
- Improved Event Aggregation: https://theeventscalendar.com/wordpress-event-aggregator/
Associated Costs of Recommended Solution $800 annually:
- Events Calendar Pro Multisite License
- Ical Importer Extension
- Filter-bar Extension
Timeline of Recommended Solution ...