Always, carefully read all inline instructions on the Content Type creation form within the Drupal interface. You will also find a video tutorial at the top of the Event form.
Following are some general guidelines. Each content creator may choose different techniques for building Event content. Please contact the COFA Web team to discuss any specific needs.
On this page:
- Types of Events
- Event Status – Sold Out, Rescheduled, Canceled
- Event Promotion through Automated Sharing
Types of Events
We generally have 3 types of events in the college:
- Single day – Happens one time and displays a start date and time.
- Production – A production, like a Broadway play, which happens numerous days and times. We want these to display as a date range in aggregated Landing Pages and with the date and time for each instance on the Detail page.
- Exhibition – A multi-day event happening over consecutive days, like an art exhibition. Displays as a date range. Check the box to display no times. We recommend including space or gallery hours in the Body field.
Occasionally, we have repeating multi-day events that should display as single day events in aggregated Landing pages. For these a repeat option is available.
Event Status – Sold Out, Rescheduled, Canceled
We do not recommend deleting an event once it has been published. Instead we recommend using the canceled status feature.
The system allows you to indicate rescheduled, sold out and canceled events, however, in most cases you will need to manually manage and mitigate issues around these special circumstances and think carefully about all instances where these events are displayed, for example, you should remove ticket buying fields or other misleading content. Please read carefully the Event Sharing section below. For events that are completely canceled, you may wish to completely delete them from your calendar after the event date is passed.
Spelling of Canceled
For consistency the College and departments communications teams have decided to spell the word canceled with a single l, as guided by AP Style. However, in the source code schema, used for search and other metadata, it is sometimes spelled with two letter ls.
Event Promotion through Automated Sharing
You are encouraged to promote your events in as many places as possible the feed sharing process available on the Drupal websites built by the COFA web team make it easy to share with the following. Historically, the automation is sometimes unreliable and we recommend you verify the process is working and continues to work, especially for high profile events.
- College site: For most of our sites, Events share automatically with the College calendar (News similarly shares to the College site). There are checkboxes in the form to not share an item. All the details of your Event will display on the College Upcoming Events Landing Page exactly like they do on your website, but will link to the Detail page on your site.
- University site: There are also checkboxes to control what is shared with the University. You can customize the information that is shared in the “Share with Other University Calendars” field set. Carefully read all instructions on the content creation form and follow the recommended workflow on the University Calendar Instructions page.
- Other sites: The Web team can create feeds to share with other sites, including University Blog Services and UT Drupal Kit Managed websites. We use the Terms in the “Event Groupings” to generate the items in various feeds. The Categories on your site’s Dashboard should indicate which Terms are used for event sharing. The content displayed on these sites is directly populated by the feed, unlike the University and College websites which “ingest” the content of the feed into new items in their calendar system.
Managing Shared Events
If you are managing events, please contact the COFA Web team for access to edit the University or College events calendars.
Deleting Events on Shared Calendars
If you accidentally shared an event and correct it on the same day, it should be find.
But if a day has passed before you catch the mistake the event has already been ingested into the other calendar and you cannot check the “Do not Share” or uncheck the “Share” box to remove the event. Your edit will remove the item from the feed but that is all it does. The other calendar does not have any indication that it should remove the event. Someone must log in to your website, the University and the College website to delete an event that has already been shared.
As mentioned above, we do not recommend deleting events once they have been published. You may wish to consider using a status indicator instead.
Remember, most site’s published events are automatically shared with the college. In the strange chance that you want the event to remain on your site, you must appropriately check or uncheck the box so that it does not share in the feed the next day.
