Like most cultural institution Web sites, the sites from BPOC member institutions have a significant emphasis on events - exhibitions, lectures, classes, tours, performances, etc. Commercial calendar products are often not flexible enough to meet the specific needs of the cultural heritage field, forcing many museums to make do with inadequate calendaring systems at great expense. For example: the complexities of scheduling events on-line for museums and cultural institutions (e.g. a tour that takes place every other Monday, except for holidays, when it happens on Tuesday) often leads to either inefficient or, on the other end of the spectrum, overly complex calendaring software that non-technical staff are loathe to embrace and technical staff are loathe to support.

Balboa Park Online Collaborative has developed a calendar package for the Drupal platform that handles the complex date functions highlighted above and an additional layer for aggregating event content from multiple sites into a central portal.

This half-day workshop is aimed at anyone with a Drupal based website with need as outlined above and for developers that are interested seeing an installation with an eye towards recreating this feature set on other open source CMS platforms. 

Participants in the workshop should expect to learn:

• How standard Drupal handles events and calendaring
• How to install the BPOC calendar backend on a standalone website
• How to construct basic calendar views once the backend calendar is installed
• The concepts related to sharing content between Drupal websites
• How to install the BPOC calendar in a multi-institutional environment

The workshop will aim to be highly interactive with conceptual information balanced with practical application via hands installs in a live server environment.

Participants will require a laptop, ftp software and a general knowledge of Drupal or a similar CMS.