Best WordPress Calendar Plugins I’ve seen so far

Based upon requests from clients, I had to look for and review a number of calendar plugins to use in WordPress sites and here are the best ones I’ve found so far. Most of them are free and you got lots of choices as well.

1. Calendar: by Kieran O’shea.

It’s a very nice and easy to use plugin and displays as a large calendar that you can easily place into a page or post and add events in categories and make them color-distinct.

You can repeat events, and assign links to them as well.

And here is a live demo for it on the developer’s own site.

2. CGM Calendar:

This is another cool one, and it’s main strong point is the so many options it presents for setting repeating events, more than any other calendar plugin, I’ve seen so far. It also allows excluding certain days to give you full control

It  allows setting colored categories, and linking events as well. And here is a live demo for the CGM Calendar.

My only catch on this one is the lack of easy way to customize the calendar look from the default vibrantly colored look which might now match every site.

3. Events Calendar:

One of the simple and easy to use calendars, it offers a sidebar widget as a quick reference which can be shown as a small calendar or a list of events, and also a large format for in-page large calendar. It also offers minimal css customization in the Options page.

What’s lacking here is repeating events and categories.

4. Easy PHP calendar:

This a paid plugin and it provides so many choices and view modes more than any of the free ones.

It’s however, somewhat complicated to setup but if you’re looking for this level of complexity, it’s definitely a good choice. And it’s developers provide a free installation service for you, if you need it.

One major advantage I’ve seen here is that it allows you to insert images into events, which I haven’t seen in any other calendar plugin so far.

And here is the live demo for it, and you also get to try the back-end here as well here if you like to before you buy it.

I’ve used it in one of my projects, www.milonga.ie, and it gave all what the client was looking for in such a plugin and here is how it looked on site.

5. Ajax Events Calendar:

Another powerful choice that I found out lately. It’s definitely worth trying out.

 

Why Not Just use the standard calendar widget that part of WordPress?

The default widget displays a calendar for posts that you enter into your blog, however, those plugins mentioned above are separate events that not linked to your posts, so it depends on what you’re trying to display.

Hope this proves helpful to you when looking for a good calendar plugin and I am looking forward to hearing about your suggestions for good ones I might have missed or never seen before.

8 Comments

• 
  heath waller October 29, 2010 at 5:13 am

  Thanks for breaking these down for me. With so many available it’s hard to know which ones to invest time in learning. This really helps!
• 
  Sue November 11, 2010 at 1:30 am

  Great post! Thanks for the calendar options. A calendar will greatly benefit our lake tahoe vacationers for them to see the local events in advance on your site! Thanks again!
• 
  stefano December 15, 2010 at 2:22 am

  Thanks for very useful tips.
  I used joomla before and I wonder if the calendar shows every event as a indexed post as it did on my old joomla calendar.. taht is good for the site to get more indexed pages..

  /S
• 
  elmalak December 15, 2010 at 2:31 am

  Dear Stefano:
  Thank you for your comment.

  I am not so sure about this point you raised in your comment, however, this is more like what the traditional calendar that comes built into WP does, as it indexes posts.
  However, those separate calendar plugins more likely do show events that are not directly related to posts, i.e. just regular events.
• 
  Lora December 21, 2010 at 6:48 am

  I love this post! You have a great blog here!
• 
  Esperanza January 26, 2011 at 11:12 am

  Thanks for posting about these calendar plugins. I wonder if you or anybody else could recommend me some really good directory plugins. I have used Business Directory by square compass and Business Directory manager by Themestown, and Connections. However, do you have any suggestions for other ones?
  I am also interested in good events directories, apart from Events Manager by wp-events-plugin.com and Events by meandmymac.net. Please suggest good ones.
  Finally, suggestions of good advertising plugins, which enables dealing with different add sizes, placing on the site, and rotation etc, apart from WP125 and AdRotate.

  Many thanks in advance,
  Esperanza
• Scheduling Made Easy! « Mike DME April 28, 2011 at 12:36 pm

  [...] good plug-in is to check its credibility. After some searching some websites, I’ve realized that some people think pretty highly of it. Not only that, but the plug-in itself has over 200,000 downloads. [...]
• 
  Academic sonet February 1, 2012 at 6:53 am

  I am searching exactly same plugin and got it.

  1000000 thanks