We’ve had a couple of people now ask us how to use the free Calendar feature in Jotter Site. It’s a really popular feature, present on hundreds of our websites already, but it can be a bit confusing to set up, so we’re here to guide you through it.
If you’ve ever used a calendar app before, whether it’s Google Docs, Microsoft Outlook or Apple’s Calendar, the interface should be immediately familiar to you, but it can take some time to learn where things are and what they’re known as in Jotter.
It can look a bit daunting at first, so we’ll go over it piece by piece.
- Add Event – This button, at the top, lets you create an event or reminder
- Add Calendar – This button lets you create calendars – sort of a category within the main app, that helps with organisation.
And then the options at the side:
- Your calendars – Your calendars will appear here, you can click them to toggle their display on the panel to the right.
- Settings – Change the important things
- Recycle Bin – Where deleted calendars go
We’ll start with Add Calendar – this is the simplest and easiest thing to do, and will really help you with both getting information out and categorising it at the back.
The name is the name of the calendar, and the description is, well, self-explanatory. I’ve categorised mine into “Clubs and Performances”, “Parents’ Evenings” and “PE” – all things parents might like to know about, though of course what you do is your own choice! Next, let’s have a look at Add Event.
This is a bit more complex than the last one, so we’ll go over it bit by bit again.
- Calendar – Specify which calendar you’d like the event attached to
- Title – What you want to call the event
- Start date, start time, end date, end time – When the event will begin and end, or alternatively check All Day for all-day events.
- Repeat – Set how often the event will repeat, if it’s a repeat event – see below
- Where – The location
- Description – What people will see when they click on the event
- Colour – You can colour-code events to make the calendar a bit easier to read
The Repeat dialog can be a bit daunting, so here’s a run-down of that
Again, we’ll go by it bit by bit:
- Repeat – whether you’d like it done daily, weekly, monthly or yearly
- Every – how many of those time intervals should pass between each event
- Repeat on – which days you’d like
- Starts – the first instance of the event
- Ends – The end conditions for it – whether it’s endless, ends on a specific date or after a set number of occurrences.
You’ll get a handy summary at the bottom of what you’ve selected – you can see my event is set to repeat every two weeks on Tuesday and Wednesday for 10 weeks.
Once that’s done, just press Create Event to send it all live. Made a mistake? Don’t worry, by clicking on the event in the calendar view you’ll be able to make edits to specific instances or even entire series of events.
Now let’s take a look at the Settings page. This is where you can start to get really fancy with what you’re doing.
Here you can import or export your calendars to use in whatever app you’d like.
- Edit details – Change the description or name of a calendar
- Share – Determine which groups can edit your calendars – you might want to give the PTA special access to an events calendar, for example
- Export – Export the calendar in iCal format, for use in your app of choice
- Import – Take an iCal file and put it into Calendar
- Delete – Remove the calendar to the Recycle Bin
- Public URL – create a text string you can use to import an automatically-updating calendar feed in your personal calendar app.
Okay, so you have a calendar now, and it’s looking great. Putting it on your website, ePortfolio or Learnsite is really easy, just go to the page in Edit mode and click Insert Item, then Calendar.
Then you’ll see this dialog:
Choose the ones you want to display using the buttons at the top (you can pick more than one!), then click Choose, and there you have it, your calendar is embedded. Anyone can scroll through the embedded calendar using the controls at the top, including viewing things on a per-week or even per-day basis! You can change the default view using the grey bar at the top of the screen when in Edit mode and the calendar is selected.
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