Get Your Spring Events Under Control Part 2: Calendars Published Mar 24, 2016 Last week we unveiled some powerful registration tools that will help you get your spring events calendars under control in Part 1 of this post. This week, we get to bring it all together with a look at how registrations tie into calendars in Rock. And how all of that will quite simply revolutionize your approach to managing, and actually enjoying, events at your church. There are three components that make up Rockʼs calendar capabilities: Calendars, Events, and Event Occurrences. Why do we need separate events and event occurences. Couldn't we just put the schedule on the event and be done with it? That would certainly work, but there are cases where the same type of event, say Baptism, happens repeatedly. Having separate event and event items allows us to do things like list all the upcoming baptism dates. Event Calendars Every organization has the need for multiple calendars. Even a small organization will have a public and private (internal) calendar. Most will have several more. Out of the box Rock ships with two pre-configured calendars: Internal: Used for internal events like staff meetings retreats, etc. Public: For events targeted towards your members and attendees. Events can even be displayed on more than one calendar. In fact, they can be displayed on as many calendars as you'd like. You can set up security for each calendar you define. This allows you to delegate the management of these calendars and their events. Event Occurences We have our calendar and now, events. All thatʼs left is to add the event occurrences that determine when these events occur. Some events may only occur once, while other apply often. Either way, they're easy to add. Calendar Blocks Your external calendar will appear on the external website. These blocks have a ton of settings (much of the page is rendered in Lava so the possibilities are endless). Bringing It All Together Hopefully you're starting to see the symbiotic relationship between event registrations and calendar events. Don't forget that groups can be linked to registrations, and that content channels also have a role with calendar events. You might be wondering how you're going to manage all these items for a specific event. We did too, so we worked hard to make it as simple as possible. While you can link registrations, events, groups and content channel items many different ways hereʼs the easiest. Create your event group that the registration will place registrants into. Create your calendar event and occurrence, using your registration template and linking to your event group. After saving the occurrence, you can enter any content channel items you need for your event. Once you create these linkages, you can view and manage them from either the calendar occurrence, group, or event instance detail screens. For more detailed screenshots on how to secure your calendars and events, as well as several options for displaying them to your guests, you'll want to view our Event and Calendar Guide online. Our hats are off to you, database administrators and event managers. Spring is your season and we want to help you shine.