Solspace Calendar "Featured" events

Question

I have a News & Highlights section on a site homepage where I'm trying to pull in entries from either a News channel or the Calendar. For both it should pull in the latest 3 entries that are tagged with a category (Featured). I have it working for the most part, except that I am unable to show the date of the event from the Solspace calendar. I realize this is due to the fact that the date is not stored in the channel entries, but needs to be pulled in via calendar:events. However, when I do this, I am getting the same date for all events output.

           <h1 class="head"><a href="/News-and-Highlights">News and Highlights</a></h1>

{exp:channel:entries channel="news|calendar_events" category="17" limit="3"}
    <div class="span4">
    {if news_body != ""}<a href="{url_title_path="News-and-Highlights/Story/"}">
    {if:else}<a href="{url_title_path="Calendar/Event/"}">
    {/if}
    <span class="link-spanner">

          <div class="row-fluid news-header">
            {if news_picture==""}<a href="{url_title_path="News-and-Highlights/Story/"}" title="{title}"><img class="news-photo" src="/Default_Images/logoDefault.png" alt=""/></a>
            {if:else}<a href="{url_title_path="News-and-Highlights/Story/"}" title="{title}"><img class="news-photo" src="{news_picture}" alt=""/></a>
            {/if}
            <div class="news-inner">
              {if news_date != ""}<span class="date-meta"><a style="color:#989898;" href="{url_title_path="News-and-Highlights/Story/"}" title="{title}">{news_date format="%F %d, %Y"}</a></span>
              {if:elseif news_body != ""}<span class="date-meta"><a style="color:#989898;" href="{url_title_path="News-and-Highlights/Story/"}" title="{title}">Announcement</a></span>
              {if:else} <span class="date-meta"><a style="color:#989898;" href="{url_title_path="Calendar/Event/"}" title="{title}">{exp:calendar:events limit="1"}{event_start_date format="%F %d, %Y"}{/exp:calendar:events}</a></span>
              {/if}
              <h3><a style="color:#4463A0;" href="{url_title_path="News-and-Highlights/Story/"}" title="{title}">{title}</a></h3>
              <h3 class="italics">{if news_author != ''}{news_author}{/if}</h3>
            </div>

          </div>

          <p>
        {if news_body != ""}{exp:sk_excerpt chars='200'}{news_body}{/exp:sk_excerpt}
        {if:else}{exp:sk_excerpt chars='200'}{event_summary}{/exp:sk_excerpt}
        {/if}
          </p>
          <div class="triangle-bottom-right"></div>

          <a class="read-more" href="{url_title_path="News-and-Highlights/Story/"}" title="{title}">Read More <i class="icon-caret-right"></i></a>

        </div>
</span>        {/exp:channel:entries}
      </div>  <!-- end news -->

Answer 1

try adding this to your calendar:events tag

event_id="{entry_id}"

You may need to stick it into an embed if nesting a calendar tag inside a channel entries tag gives you trouble.

---

EDITED

I believe A better approach to accomplish what you're after would be to use a {exp:channel:entries} tag for your news and a {exp:calendar:cal} tag for your events.

If you need to limit the number of events returned by calendar tag see the event_limit parameter and this example. http://www.solspace.com/docs/calendar/calendar/#examples

Trying to get 3 entries from either channel would be tricky. A couple ideas are:

1. You could build a stash list from the 2 tags and output only 3 items
2. You could try to tweak the calendar_events entries entry_date (not calendar field date) and sort by it.

Without knowing a little more about what the news and events entries look like that's about all I can think of.