Pros: easy to use, nice clean layout, and front end modules
Cons: untitled, 24 hour time field, lack of fields for other info critical for events such as venue, city, website link, and only has basic text editing, not rich text.

After hunting around and testing just about every calendar/events type component for joomla, I finally settled on eventCal.

My criteria for selecting it was that it had to be simple; allow frontend event submission/editing; integrate into the core joomla search; fit a 3 column template; offer alternative ways to present the events (upcoming events/mini-cal) and lastly a GUI that was easily configurable (aka CSS/PHP/HTML).

Although eventCal doesn't completely meet my criteria, it does manage to come fairly close. So, with a few tweaks and one hack, it's now working great for me.

A few problems I have encountered are all pretty well documented in here and joomla forums as well as on the forge forums, but just to regurgitate two or three of them.

1) EventCal seriously needs to improve it's backend usage of categories to be more compliant with the rest of the joomla CMS functionality. At times, it's almost alien in the way it jumps in and out of itself to setup categories.

2) Using a textarea as the means to write the description of an event totally disempowers the user. Meaning that there is no WYSIWYG editor, no HTML, no BBC and more importantly, no mambot support.

3) Dates and Time formats need to be re-worked (or hacked). Sure the USA uses Month/Day/Year, but NZ doesn't. Sure Europe uses 24hr clocks, but NZ doesn't. [and yes, I do know that I can alter a few things in the template, the PHP and language files, but would a newbie know how?]

ANYWAYS, enough whinging, this is a great addition to a joomla powered website and you won't go far wrong picking this as your Event Calendar!

Kudos to the Author, looking forward to the next update :)

Well, I have been using Joomla for less than a week, and this is the first extension I have obtained and placed on my web site. I had no difficulty whatsoever setting it up, and am very pleased with its functionality.

So far I have found only two minor issues to mention.
One is that an event has to be given a specific starting time and ending time. It would be nice to have the option to simply chose "all day" or "no specified time."

The second is that the calendar that pops up in the "add new event" page has the week starting on Monday rather than Sunday. This goes against (for me) over 50 years of looking at calendars the "normal" way, so I can expect to be clicking on a lot of wrong dates and having to come back and correct it.

Other than that ... so far it has been smooth sailing, and I am very thankful for the work that was put into this component.

The extension looked good at first, and was easy to install and look at. Then I read through the documentation to see how many features I could use.

Content is stored in a proprietary manner. - This is a content management system, why not use its content management features to provide more functionality?

Content can only be edited from the back end. - If existing storage would have been used (along with an index for additional data), front and back end manipulation and controls would have been possible through Joomla. Instead, we're limited to using two proprietary category managers and no section to allow proper browsing and front-end submittal.

As a noob to Joomla, I found the overall install to be confusing. Since I'm still not fluent in Joomla it took a lot of experimenting to get everything set up. However, after getting eventCal installed it looks great Had trouble figuring out how to get the add button to link in but finally worked my way through it. Might be helpful to add some basic instructions in the end user manual to cover this for noobs. Look forward to getting my site into production and using the calender. Thanks to the development team for providing this extension.

From what I've seen of other calendars out there, this one fits my needs perfectly! Except it doesn't work. It seems to think that every day is the 30th of whatever month. If that got fixed I would definately try it out!

The component is fairly customizable, but it took a long while to figure out how to get the dates to be displayed the way I wanted in the accompanying module. It would have been nice if all the % codes were documented... they are case sensitive, so there are 52 combinations to try.

Also, the generated events on the module are automatically created as links, which can be useful in some circumstances, but it would be nice if I could turn it off. I wish I could embed HTML in the event descriptions so that I could provide a link directly to the site chatroom for my chat events. (A separate event link field could also accomodate this, but sometimes I have multiple links, for instance, for a sports event, you might have Live Stats, Box Score, and Chat.)

I appreciated that the component allows for different categories of events, but this part of the module needs some more robustness added.

Finally, it would be nice if the module allowed for some pretext and posttext to be inserted before and after the list of events. For instance, I would like to be able to insert blanket text that all events are free and open to the public and provide a link to our PDF year-long calendar.

I really like this component and have used it on two sites already. Entering events from both the frontend and backend is a breeze. And unlike another user below I found that it used the menu ItemId fine.

The one con I've had thus far is eventCals limit to 24 hour time, which my clients in the USA find confusing. So I put together a little hack to allow for users to enter time in almost anyway they like to and a javascript will decode it.

see here:
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,114307.0.html

Other than this hack to solve the time format issue I haven't found much else to complain about.

It's a neat little component that fits my needs fairly well.

One irritating issue:
The page title and contentheading shows "event calendar - [menu item name]". A standard Joomla component should allow you to freely choose the name of the page, but here we are stuck with "evant calendar".

One serious issue:
There is no itemID in the event-links created by the module mod_eventcal_upcoming. This module is the very reson why I use this component, but since itemID is not inherrited in the links, the target page is terribly empty (no modules shown). No good, and no Joomla standard. Way to go ;)

I run a martial arts school and wanted an event calendar that let me break things down into group (students, public, special events, etc.) and create exceptions for regularly scheduled classes. This component fit the bill perfectly. Installed it. It works without headaches or tinkering (something I haven't been able to say about many joomla components). Easy to use and not bad looking (could used a few different skins though). If you're looking for an on-line calendar that works and gives you good functionality, this is the one.

First I have to say that this tool have a very nice design and a good functionallity.

But one of the major features for me, the new posting of an event from the front end, isn't working. There is no Icon or button or link to do that.

Only the viewing and editing of an existing event is working on my site.

If this features is implemented the eventCal is an very fine extension.

I believe this to be the best events calendar currently available. It has a superb appearance and great functionality. There are a few things that need polishing but I can’t see another component that offers anything better.
I’d look forward to the front end administrating. And the only cool feature that would be real handy is XML output so others could RSS the events.
Great work and I have loads of admiration for you guys. A product worth supporting for sure.

After tormenting myself for two weeks trying to track down the necessary documentation I needed to figure out how to do what I needed to do to configure and use it the way I wanted - I gave up!

A cruicial feature was that my users can submit events - never got it working correctly.

I don't mind wading through the documentation to get the answer I need; I do mind not having the documentation I need!! (grin)

If it's out there - I couldn't find it!

Part of my 'thing' is that it's not pretty (imho) trying to find the info I want at Source Forge and would rather do without some of the functionality of EventCal than continue the torture.

Hope that helps,
t

The layout is gorgeous and editing is a breeze. However, I'm still waiting for a "Location" field and the ability to enter the time in 12 hour format with am and pm rather than 24 hour.

Working with EventCal (1.6.2 and now 1.6.3) has been one of the most frustrating exercises since I started working with Joomla. I've found no bugs in 1.6.2 that are not still existing in 1.6.3

The calendar persists in overlapping outside the available space in Firefox and drops off the bottom of the screen in IE. because it is too wide for the available space - I have tried 5 different templates with the same result (see www.uppercoomerachurch.com/joomla) - is there any way to control the size of the display? Also, no matter what selections I make the week numbers still display.

At first look this looks like a nice component but when it comes down to it, it simply doesn't work well enough to use.