The Best Event Plugins for WordPress | EP 751

The Best Event Plugins for WordPress

1. https://theeventscalendar.com/products/wordpress-events-calendar/ 00:51
2. https://sugarcalendar.com 03:53

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, i’m David Blackmon.

00:35 Tim Strifler: And i’m Tim Strifler

00:38 David Blackmon: And today in episode 751 we are going to talk about the best event plugins for WordPress. So an event plug-in, if you’re not sure is, just what it says. If you manage or host events online, in person, you know you have a schedule a calendar of events. If you’re a non-profit or if um whatever it is you know an educator, and you have things going on. And you want to show this on your website you know, whether it’s in a daily a weekly a monthly calendar. If you want to allow people to sign up, if you want to allow people to purchase tickets to events cons or opinion of the top two in WordPress. Tim you want to start us off or talk about something else?

01:38 Tim Strifler: Yeah absolutely. So one thing i will say, David is out in the woods. And so, uh if you’re listening this audio only you shouldn’t hear anything different, but if you’re watching on youtube you might hear a little bit of static from his, and a little bit of a delay. So just wanted to make you aware of that he has some super fast internet coming soon. So even when he’s in the middle of nowhere. Yeah as David mentioned event plugins are incredibly useful. Uh yeah all kinds of businesses host events and want to be able to have their calendar online. So their customers and everything can see, like churches is another really popular one that typically all churches that have a website are going to have some sort of calendar with all their events and stuff. So super important um. So David i’ll actually let you talk about the first one here because you guys use that one in your child themes then i’ll talk about the second one.

02:28 David Blackmon: Absolutely. Yeah the first one that we’re going to talk about that we use and honestly, we love is the events calendar and uh this plugin has been around ever since i’ve been doing WordPress. It was the first events plugin I had, a non-profit client. Early on in my WordPress days somewhere around you know 2014-ish in that realm, and it’s insanely powerful and highly customizable. It’ll allow you to do event sales, free events, paid events, donations. It is it kind of if you can imagine whatever your event needs might be the event calendar has it in there it comes designed you know styled out of the box really really good. But it also, you also have the flexibility to put your own brand on there, and and that makes it huge when you integrate it into your website and stuff Because you know, you want your customers to come, and recognize your brand and stuff. And it’s just a an insanely powerful tool. Uh so the first one is the Events Calendar plugin, and is that the one that Liquid Web bought or a Sugar Calendar one uh?

03:45 Tim Strifler: No Liquid Web bought the Events Calendar

03:47 David Blackmon: Yeah okay so now it’s owned by Liquid Web which is a managed WordPress hosting company and stuff. So yeah check them out eventscalendar.com

03:55 Tim Strifler: Yeah the next one, we’re going to talk about is Sugar Calendar, and you can find that at sugarcalendar.com. And it’s by the same team behind Easy Digital Downloads Affiliate WP and a bunch of others and actually that company Sandhills development was acquired by Awesomemotive which owns WP Forms WP Beginner. So many other ones. They have a ton of products, i’m blanking on the rest of them monster insights monster yeah absolutely. So um yeah a lot of acquisitions happening in the WordPress realm so that’s the bottom line here. But um sugar calendar is awesome. Now they don’t have a free version like the Events Calendar does. So you can get started on the Events Calendar for free and then you can pay for their add-ons and support and stuff like that.  I believe Sugar Calendar used to have uh a free version now they’re premium only and the reason why you’re seeing more companies do this is because they’re able to uh provide much better support. When you have a free plug-in it’s really hard to keep up with with providing free support and maintaining it and everything, because if you don’t then people will give you bad reviews and then no one will want to use your plugin. And so um a lot of developers are going the premium only route now, and so that’s kind of what they did is they shifted away from their their free version. And now that’s premium only but for one site it’s only 50 bucks a year. Um and so uh for a client site or a website that has a lot of events that’s a pretty good bargain. 50 bucks a year you get premium support and all of that too. So what i like about Sugar Calendar and i guess the products behind Sandhills Development in general is they make them very lightweight. They don’t add in a lot of extra unnecessary styling and features and stuff like that. Everything’s really clean, the admin interface is really clean, and i’m not saying this in contrast to the Events Calendar i haven’t actually used the Events Calendar. So i can’t compare, but i do know Sugar Calendar that’s kind of the the way they do things. And so um yeah it’s really great, really clean interface and super powerful. So i definitely recommend checking that out. If you need to create a website that has events whether you’re selling events or just need to post them, Sugar Calendar and the Events Calendar are definitely the best two plugins to look at. 

08:48 David Blackmon: Awesome, tomorrow we’ve got another great topic, Google Search Console versus Google Analytics. We’re going to talk about it, tell you when you may want to use one or the other and what the differences are. Tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then..

06:44 Tim Strifler: Take care, bye.