You are asking for a lot. You'll find few calendaring systems out there that do what you want.

The problem is, this is a job that would take some time and up to this point no one or group has wanted to pay for it.

That being said, there is an issue open on the date module that would fix your repeating events with special cases issue. It's really a matter of someone having the time to code it.

Calendar not displaying times for repeating events after the first instance:

jeggen, what issue are you reffering to? I noticed the issue on drupal.org, but I was not able to reproduce it. Maybe I can help.

Arlin,

Here is my original post:
http://drupal.org/node/414628

I also found something similar at:
http://drupal.org/node/352753

Let me know. Our calendaring needs match what you described almost exactly.

The biggest missing piece for us is the resource management. My challenge has been that our church currently uses ServiceU for both calendaring and resource management. The staff absolutely refuses to give up the ServiceU resource management and refuses to do double-entry for events. So our calendar ends up being the ServiceU calendar. I don't particularly like our calendaring solution, but I don't have any easy solution for either the resource management or Drupal integration.

But as I've spent a lot of time looking into this, I think a lot of your requirements are doable today.

I've done what I think you're talking about with the category specific blocks by creating a custom CCK event node type. Use taxonomy to define the categories and Views to create taxonomy-based block views. If the categories can be pulled from your URL, you can even do this with one block view that uses arguments. The problem I've run into is the repeating events. I haven't found any way to get the block view to show only the next scheduled instance of a repeating event. I can get it to show one event with the original date or every event instance that occurs in the future (with the correct dates), but not a single instance with the next event date. I opened an issue in the date module queue on this. It got closed by KarenS several weeks ago as having been addressed with submitted enhancements, but when I tried to get it to work with the new version, it still wasn't there. I haven't had a chance to revisit this over the past two months or so.

The recurring events issues you describe only seem to be a problem for non-calendar views. When displaying events with the calendar module, the recurring events issues appear to be resolved. It's only when you want to create other views that filter based on date that I've seem problems with recurring events.

As for recurring event exceptions, I seem to recall that the repeating date API allows you to specify exceptions. Is there a specific scenario that isn't handled by the existing exception interface?

Here's a solution that I personally liked, but received a luke-warm reception from our staff. Maybe it will work for you.

• Create a custom event node type. Include in this node type the ability to define specific details for what is needed for the event (how many people, how many tables, chairs, A/V equipment, etc). You can configure all these fields to not display for the average user. Set permissions so that any registered user can create events, but by default make them unpublished. Do NOT give general registered users permission to publish the nodes.
• Create a role for an event manager. Give THAT role permission to publish nodes. I'm not sure if it's possible to define that kind of permission only for a specific node type, but it should be relatively easy to figure that out.
• Create a view for the event manager role so they can see the events that have been entered, along with which events have been published and which are unpublished. At this point, they would handle the resource reservation, conflict resolution, etc. If there is a confict, this person resolves this and makes any necessary changes to the event node. For our staff, this is where I would propose the event gets entered into the ServiceU system.
• Once everything is good to go, the event manager publishes the node and it shows up on the calendar, on category-specific blocks, etc.
• One other thing that I thought would be a nice feature would be to add a "publish on front page" checkbox to the event node type. Only the event manager can check this box. Then you create a views rotator block for the front page that scrolls through upcoming events that have this box checked.

What I kind of envisioned was a site where events are displayed not just on a calendar. The 'category-specific blocks' would be views rotator blocks. The categories would be the various church ministries. Then the children's ministries page would show upcoming children's ministries events, the youth ministries page would show upcoming youth events, etc. The front page would have a front-page specific view that looked at the 'display on front page' checkbox, independent of category/ministry.

Hope this helps.

Matt,

We keep running into the same limitations I described earlier and this is becoming a hindrance to us in using our online calendar. We might be willing to pay to have someone program this and keep it open source. Any idea how much or who might be interested in doing the work?

I spent literally hours playing with drupal and looking for information on how to get the repeat dates to only show the next event. I finally found a module that is not on the drupal site. It is located here othermachines.com This fixed my repeating date issues.

I'm new to drupal and views. I have a event content type with categories but I'm trying to figure out how to get views to display only the kids events on the kids page (with kids being one of the categories). If you could provide info on how you did that I'd be greatly appreciative.