Categories
After you install JEvents you should open the component in the backend and click on 'Manage Categories'. As the name suggests categories are used to organise events into different types. You could have categories like 'kids', 'adults', 'families' or 'football', 'tennis', 'running' - whatever suits your data structure.
You can have multi level categories e.g. 'tennis' and 'football' at a top level then 'kids tennis' and 'pro tennis' beneath tennis etc.
When you create an event you must specify a category for the event. If you feel you need more than one category do classify each events you should look at the club Event Tagging addon which allows you to add keywords tags to events.
Calendars
This concept may be a little confusing at first - it represents a collection of events and NOT it presentation in the frontend of the site.
Calendars and categories are not locked to each other in any way other than the fact that you must specify a default category for a caledar. This is so that when you add an event this category is the one selected in the category dropdown - it can of course be changed.
There are 3 types of calendar in JEvents:
- A native JEvents calendar created 'from scratch'
- A calendar imported from a file
- A calendar imported from a URL
The 'From Scratch' calendar is the primary type of calendar in JEvents - you must have one of these. You add events to this type of calendar via the JEvents event editing interface.
The 'From file' calendar is designed for one off imports of events from a calendar application on your computer e.g. iCal or Sunbird. You cannot reimport this calendar to update these events at a later date but you can edit them within JEvents.
The 'From URL' calendar is designed for linking to online calendar apps like Google calendar. You put the URL for the ics export in the URL field and then these events are imported into JEvents. You can update these at a later date by clicking the icon in the Update colomn - or refresh these using a cronjob using the URL in the anon-refresh column (if this is enabled).
It is important to note that each time you refresh/reimport from an external URL all events in this calendar will be replaced - because of this you should not edit these events within JEvents unless you do not intend to reimport at a later date.
Displaying Event Data in the Frontend
You will want to create menu items for JEvents in the frontend of your site. When you choose the layout you want you can specify that this layout should only show events from specific categories by selecting these in the component parameters of the menu item.
Silver members of the club can use the Calendars Addon which will enable you to restrict menu items and module to access to events only from specified calendars.