Guidelines for Submitting an Event to the Calendar of Events

The following guidelines are designed to make calendar entries more useful to users. Event titles and dates/times are required; all other fields are optional.

• Event Titles should be as descriptive as possible without being too wordy. Exclamation marks and all-capital letters should not be used. (All-capital letters should avoided throughout.) Conciseness is encouraged; the name of the sponsoring organization or lecture series should not be included in the title. The title will appear in list views of calendar events along with the event time and location. Note that the calendar will feed lists of events outside of the calendar proper (the college home page, RSS feeds, personal calendar entries, etc.), and those “outside applications” may have to truncate event titles to fit their specific space constraints.
• Always include an ending Date/Time, even if it’s an approximation. Doing so will make your event stand out better if it’s added to a personal calendar and will help users plan. If your event has multiple occurrences, e.g., a film shown five times over three nights, a separate calendar entry should be created for each occurrence — creating a single entry for a recurring event will make it appear that your event actually begins at the “From” date/time and ends at the “To” date/time, which won’t provide an accurate start time for anything but the first occurrence, and could scare away attendees (the potential audience for 72-hour films is pretty small).
• Locations should be brief and make sense to the potential audience. For example, an event aimed at the campus community might specify a location of “Kirby 104,” whereas an event that will attract a wider audience might say “Kirby Hall of Civil Rights, Room 104.” Complete mailing addresses are typically not needed, and including “Lafayette College” or “Easton, PA” for on-campus events is not necessary.
• The Presenter value will appear in the event details. The field can be used to indicate the event speaker, performer, etc.
• Price can be anything from complete details of a tiered scheme to “Free” or just blank. If an event is free for Lafayette students and/or employees but not free to community members, it’s a good idea to state that explicitly, e.g., “$10; Free to Lafayette students and employees”.
• An Image associated with an event can be uploaded. It will appear in the event details view and will be resized to 150×150 pixels. The event description will wrap to the right of the image.
• Event Descriptions will appear in the event detail view. The default input format allows text only, includes automatic line and paragraph breaks, and will turn URLs into links. The input format can be changed to allow a limited amount of HTML code by clicking the “Input format” link and changing to “Filtered HTML”. Contact information is best included in the “Contact Information” section rather than the description.
• The Additional Information field can be used to supply a URL for a Website with information related to the event. The URL will become a link that says “Additional Information”. If the site to which you’re linking doesn’t really fit that description, you can add a label and a URL to the description field and the URL will become a link. For example, the description field could contain “Directions:” or “To register, go to” followed by the appropriate URL.
• Category — an event can be assigned to multiple categories as long as they make sense, and an event that’s not assigned to any category(ies) will still appear in the main calendar view. (If an event doesn’t fit any category, consider assigning a tag (see next item).) Categories are used to generate feeds, subscriptions, and focused views of similar type events. For an explanation of event categories, see the Category Descriptions page.
• Tags are free-text words and phrases that can be used to help describe an event with terms that may not appear in the event title or description. Tag terms are included in the calendar search, and tags can be used to generate ics files and RSS feeds that calendar users can subscribe to. The Tags field has a type-ahead feature that will offer tag terms that other event submitters have already used. You can type your own term(s), but choosing a term already in use will help categorize similar type events and make them easier to find.