Advice on organizing events using Calendar module

Question

I'm looking for some general advice and best practices on organizing/architecting a calendar using the Solspace Calendar module. We are redesigning the Special Olympics of VA website. This group has a ton of events which are organizing by local "Areas" that include counties and cities. These Areas are further grouped by Region (like Southwest, East, etc).

The Areas manage events, so individuals there will need to be able to post their events. For that reason, it seems sensible to create calendars for each Area – about 31 total. However, the audience for this site frequently needs to view events by regions – essentially a collection of Areas. To further complicate things, there are a few types of events, such as Sports or Fundraising.

I'd like to maximize the built-in features of Calendar where possible, adapting the demo templates and so on so that we can do as much as possible for the organization with the budget we have.

It seems to me that the best way may be to simply use Categories for both Regions and types of events. That's not native to the Calendar module, but seem like it wouldn't take much to filter by a category url title.

Would love anyone's thoughts on this. You can check out their current calendar here.

Answer 1

It seems to me that the best way may be to simply use Categories for both Regions and types of events. That's not native to the Calendar module, but seem like it wouldn't take much to filter by a category url title.

That is the direction I would go. Two category groups -- Region and Type -- with Areas being subcategories for the Regions. You'd want to make sure that you set Auto-Assign Parent Categories (Admin → Channel Administration → Global Preferences) to yes.