Calendar plugin to print

  • I continue to be flummoxed by my inability to find a WordPress solution to what must be a common problem. I work with a weekly newspaper company. Our print calendar, which is managed on a very old version of Microsoft Access, includes a few hundred events each week. The web version is a text dump, not dynamic at all. It would be great to be able to administer the calendar online through WordPress, with people entering their own events, then export events each week for the paper.

    The plugins I’ve tried generally seem to be designed to be used by a site displaying only a few dozen events, but they might still work. Exporting seems to be a bigger issue. Is there any way to take the contents of the exported .csv or .xml file and make it into nice paragraphs, like you’d use when placing a file into a print layout program like inDesign? Or maybe more importantly, has anyone done this? Whenever I bring this up I hear things like “sure, text to tables” (for inDesign) or “there’s got to be something with XML that will work” etc. Or else something about Word macros or writing some sort of script.

    Is that what’s needed? Do we need to hire someone to write a script? Something more extensive? Another member of our organization recently spoke to two different programmers about doing a calendar program from scratch. They wanted around $15,000 or $20,000. I don’t think that’s necessary, but neither can I find a solution myself.

    Like I said, there must be many people in this situation — small- to medium-size publishers using WordPress sites, hoping to use the website to host their calendar database. Am I missing something or is there currently no elegant solution to this?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    I can see an issue in the way that the data is stored and the way that you’re trying to extract it.
    It seems that you’re mixing non-tabular information such as paragraphs with tabular information such as calendar dates into one software.
    When you are extracting that information, you are expecting the software to distinguish between them and then treat them differently.

    Thread Starter dendis84

    (@dendis84)

    Wouldn’t it be possible for a plugin to take the tabular information and export them in the order you want in a text file? Something like:

    <Date>. <Time>. <Title>. <Description>. <Location>. <Cost>.

    Which might read:

    2/2/2016. 10am. Community Cupcake Festival. A family-friendly fundraiser for local arts programs. Village square. $5.

    At that point you’d probably want to do some find & replace in Word and some other cleanup, but it wouldn’t be too bad.

    Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    Yes as long as there’s a standard structure that you and all other people follow for creating your WordPress calendars in Microsoft Access. Otherwise the issue is that the plugin won’t know where to look and how to handle the data.

    Thread Starter dendis84

    (@dendis84)

    Thanks Andrew. I’m actually hoping to use one of the various WordPress calendar plugins to host our online calendar and leave Access behind. Do you know if there are any calendar or export plugins that would accomplish what we outlined above?

    Thread Starter dendis84

    (@dendis84)

    If anyone comes across this, we did eventually solve this with some custom javascript that formatted a csv file.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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