Amazingly simple in it's simplicity. Does exactly what the developer states. Easy to install and integrate into any content text. Surprisingly, locates wikipedia info on just about anything I referenced using the bot. Absolutely superb addition to any joomla! implementation. A "MUST HAVE!"

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 :)