Documentation

PHP Event Calendar is a out-of-box web calendar/scheduler solution. It will run on web servers that support PHP 5.3 and higher.

• PHP 7.0 or later
• Apache, Tomcat, or Microsoft IIS web server
• MySQL database (more databases support coming up!)

PHP Event Calendar is designed to support multiple database type. The current database supported is MySQL only. MS SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL support will be added soon.

PHP Event Calendar Supports all major web browsers:

PEC_PATH

PEC_PATH represents the absolute URL to the PHP Event Calendar folder on your web server.

For instance, if the URL to get to the PHP Event Calendar is https://www.yoursite.com/phpEventCalendar, or https://localhost/phpEventCalendar, the PEC_PATH should be “/phpEventCalendar“.

if the URL to PHP Event Calendar is https://www.yoursite.com/admin/phpEventCalendar, or https://localhost/admin/phpEventCalendar, the PEC_PATH should be “/admin/phpEventCalendar“,

and so forth.

During installation, PHP Events Calendar creates a login similar to the page online event calendar demo. The default login is

name: admin
password: 123456

You can change the login credential in “pec_users” table in MySQL. The password is encrypted by MD5 hash. You can generate one here.

Here’s the SQL query to insert new user into the calendar database table ‘pec_users’ with user role as “user”. You would need to simply replace with some real user data. The password is encoded in MD5. Web-based GUI users management tool will be added in future release.

Note that the above default user account is an admin account who can create and modify any event. To display events read only, send your users to public calendar page in which the events can be browsed but cannot be modified.

Please note that users who have “admin” role can have access to all calendars of other non-admin users.

The role can only be changed in database table “pec_users”.

Once logged in as an admin, user will see a web calendar similar to the following. New events can be added to the calendar by clicking a date or import a Google Calendar events (see the next post).

Click below to enlarge.

(click to enlarge)

It’s easy to add a new blank calendar or directly import a Google Calendar by click “Add Google Calendar Instead” button in New Calendar window.

Create a New Blank Calendar

Click on the plus sign “+” on the calendar list in the left sidebar to create a new blank calendar.

Click on “Create Calendar” to finish creating a new blank calendar.

Import a Google Calendar

Another way to create new calendar to import from Google Calendar which can serve as an alternative backend calendar manages system.

You must first have a Google Calendar API Key:

1. Go to the Google Developer Console and create a new project (it might take a second).
2. Once in the project, go to APIs & auth > APIs on the sidebar.
3. Find “Calendar API” in the list and turn it ON.
4. On the sidebar, click APIs & auth > Credentials.
5. In the “Public API access” section, click “Create new Key”.
6. Choose “Browser key”.
7. If you know what domains will host your calendar, enter them into the box. Otherwise, leave it blank to allow any hosts. You can always change it later.
8. Your new API key will appear in a few seconds.
9. Copy the key for later use.

Make your Google Calendar public:

1. In the Google Calendar interface, locate the “My calendars” area on the left.
2. Hover over the calendar you need and click the downward arrow.
3. A menu will appear. Click “Share this Calendar”.
4. Check “Make this calendar public”.
5. Make sure “Share only my free/busy information” is unchecked.
6. Click “Save”.

Obtain your Google Calendar’s ID:

1. In the Google Calendar interface, locate the “My calendars” area on the left.
2. Hover over the calendar you need and click the downward arrow.
3. A menu will appear. Click “Calendar settings”.
4. In the “Calendar Address” section of the screen, you will see your Calendar ID. It will look something “sdfalskjfasfjsasdf12323asdf@group.calendar.google.com”.

Final Step: Save both Google Calendar API Key and ID in Our Event Calendar

Now, you should have both Google Calendar ID as well as its API Key:

1. Enter the Calendar ID in New Calendar
2. Enter the API Key saved earlier in the Calendar Settings.

TL;DR? Watch screencast! Google Calendar Import

Click on the gear icon to open the Manage Calendar window:

The Manage Calendar Window has the following options:

• Export – export the selected calendar in .ical format (more on iCalendar format).
• Make Public/Private – When set to private, the calendar is not publicly accessible.
• Delete (Calendar) – Delete a calendar. Warning: all its events will be removed permanently!
• Edit (Calendar) – Edit calendar title, description, and color etc.

Note that the globe icon links to a public URL for that specific calendar.

In event window, an user can specify event basic information, Title, Start and End Date and Time, repeating event section and additional event information, plus email reminders.

The event window comprises the followings:

• Basic Event Information
  • Title
  • Start & End Date Time
• Standard Settings:
  • Repeating Events
  • Description
  • Organizer
  • Resource
  • Background Color
  • Event Image
  • Privacy
• Venue
• Reminder
• More to come…

Note that some features are only available in paid version such as repeating events, multiple calendars, and reminder.

The first thing in Edit Event Window is the basic event section. To set up a basic event, the only information needed are a Title, Start & End date and time. When the All Day checkbox is selected in Standard Settings, the End date and time are not needed.

PHP Event Calendar supports repeating events. To set recurring events, in Event Edit Window (shown in previous post), check “Repeat” checkbox in Standard Settings section. Common event intervals are readily available to choose from.

Users can also specify Start date and Ending Condition. The repeat patterns are designed similar to Google Calendar has.

Enter additional event information in the Standard Settings section.

• Organizer
  • Click “Add Organizer” to add one first if it’s not already existed in the dropdown.
• Resource
  • Click “Add Resource” to add a resource first
• Calendar
  • Select an existing calendar from the dropdown
• Privacy

You can also update an image for the event and choose whether to display the image thumbnail in month view only.

Inside you can enter an event venue information. Venue includes address, phone, and URL. The information will be used for Google Map and venue contact.

Click on “Add Venue ” to enter an event Venue:

Event with Venue with addressed mapped in Google Map

PHP Event Calendar packs with advanced features such as repeating events and event reminder. For event reminder works with hosts with cron job enabled to send out emails reminders time specified by users.

One or more emails are supported for event email reminders.

In the future release, users can set reminders to send SMS text messages or voice reminders to telephones.

Troubleshoot

Create future events with reminders in calendar.

In your terminal, you can try test send reminder manually first.

cd /var/www/html/phpEventCalendar/crons

php events-reminder.php

Check if any errors returns and fix them accordingly. If it look good, check email in your inbox, if you see the reminder email. Congrats, it works!

Cron could also be an issue at times. Run the following to get cron logs and find out if any errors and fix them accordingly.

grep cron /var/log/syslog

Addition Resource Setting up Cron

https://crontab.guru/every-30-minutes

https://blog.dennisokeeffe.com/blog/2021-01-19-running-cronjobs-on-your-local-mac

https://towardsdatascience.com/a-step-by-step-guide-to-scheduling-tasks-for-your-data-science-project-d7df4531fc41#919e

Resource view is a new additional to PHP Event Calendar. It is extremely useful to manage different people, equipment, or room used by a calendar.

Resource view is only available in paid version.

PHP EventCalendar has a number of different “views”, or ways of displaying days and events.

The following is an example of calendar day view.

The following is an example of week view. Each column represents day of week. A day always starts at 12AM. A all-day view always display “all-day” row on top below header.

The following is a calendar month view. Each event can have different background color and event image thumbnail.

Agenda view is a list of your events in chronological order. It provides a quick glance at your calendar with a list of upcoming appointments, all-day and multiple day events. All-day and multi-day events are listed at the start of each day. Days without events are not shown. A black line indicates where today begins.

Upcoming events shows a list of current day events and upcoming future events. It displays start, end date and time; event images, if there are any; and event title and description.