Tutorial: Automatic Posting of Events to Facebook (Updated)

One of Zap Calendar's unique features is the ability to automatically post upcoming events to Facebook.  For example, an upcoming event in your calendar could be posted automatically 2 days prior to the event on your Facebook page. Over the years this feature has been accomplished through several services that have since come and gone.  Twitter Feed is the latest service to shut down that was used to push Zap Calendar events to Facebook. Fortunately, there is a new service that can also push events to Facebook and this service appears to be much more popular due to the multiple connected sources it supports.  Zapier (No relationship to Zap Calendar ;-) connects applications and automates workflows using "Zaps" (really, there is not relationship between us and them), and works very nicely with posting events from your Zap Calendar site to Facebook. This article describes how to configure Zapier and Zap Calendar to enable posting of events to Facebook. This feature is available with all versions of Zap Calendar, including the Lite version.

Read more: Tutorial: Automatic Posting of Events to Facebook (Updated)

Data Scraping Protection

Data Scraping Protection (DSP) is a new feature with Zap Calendar 4.2.  When enabled, DSP takes Joomla's internal IDs in Zap Calendar URL's and replaces them with alternate, non-sequential IDs. This prevents your event data from getting stolen by bots or users using URL guessing or automatic URL generation techniques. 

For example, a Zap Calendar non-SEF URL like this:

http://mydomain.com/calendar/option=com_zcalendar?view=event&calid=7&id=1762&Itemid=212

will be converted to this URL when DSP is enabled:

http://mydomain.com/calendar/option=com_zcalendar?view=event&calid=BF8A06622C9279C5&id=676E9E9F5EA074D4&Itemid=212

This works for SEF URLs too.  For example:

http://mydomain.com/calendar/7,1762-friday-meeting 

will be converted to this DSP URL:

http://mydomain.com/calendar/BF8A06622C9279C5,676E9E9F5EA074D4-friday-meeting

With DSP enabled, the internal event ID and calendar ID are replaced with a non-sequential number, making it impossible to guess the URLs of events. Interestingly, sh404SEF URLs will not change if DSP is enabled or disabled. However, you will need to purge your old links in sh404SEF's URL Manager to rebuild the SEF URLs using the new Zap Calendar URLs.

DSP may not be for everyone, but may be useful for sites where protecting your calendar data is important, for example, when users create their own events or when Zap Calendar's personal calendar feature is enabled.  When data scraping protection is enabled, URLs in the original format will no longer work.  It is best to enable this for a new Zap Calendar site or set the feature to "transitional" for existing sites.  Transitional mode will create the new URL's but will still accept old URLs.  Switching from transitional to full protection can be done later when use of the old URLs is minimized.

DSP is a site wide feature and is enabled from the global Zap Calendar settings.  This feature works only with Zap Calendar URLs.  It is available with all Zap Calendar free and subscription versions.

Tutorial: How to Automatically Tweet Events Using IFTTT.com

We have written previously about how to automatically post upcoming events from Zap Calendar to Facebook using Zapier. This article will show you how to automatically post upcoming events to Twitter using IFTTT.com . IFTTT.com, which stands for, "If This, Then That", also allows automatically posting events to Facebook too, however, this tutorial will show how to post upcoming events to Twitter. This feature is available with all versions of Zap Calendar, including the Lite version.

 

Read more: Tutorial: How to Automatically Tweet Events Using IFTTT.com

Tutorial: Creating a Sign-up Page Using the Sign Me Up! Add-On

(Coming Soon)

"Sign Me Up!" Uses Zap Calendar to manage events.  To create a sign-up page, either edit an existing event or create a new event.  If creating a new event, make sure you enter at least a title, at least one category and the start and end date of the event.

Enable Sign-Ups for an Event

The following sign-up parameters are available when creating or editing an event:

 

Allow Sign-ups: Set this to "Yes" to enable sign-ups and allow users to sign-up for items for this event.

Send Reminder (days): This will automatically send an e-mail reminder to those who have signed-up prior to the event with a list of sign-up items.

E-mail Me After Sign-up: If enabled, the event owner/organizer will receive an e-mail when a user has signed up for an item.

Sign-up By: The sign-ups will close on this date.  If blank, the event start date will be used as the close date.

Include Phone #: You can optionally add a phone number field to the sign-up.  If enabled, the phone number can be set as an optional or required field for the sign-up.

Show Sign-up Names: If enabled, the list of people who have signed up for each item will be displayed on the event page.  If disabled, only the event owner will be able to see the list of sign-up names.

Save the event to enable the settings.

Manage Sign-up Items

Once sign-ups are enabled for an event, sign-up items can be added to the event.  You must be the event owner/planner or and administrator to create sign-up items, and sign-up items can only be managed from the front-end.

 Click the "Add Item" button on the page, where you can enter the following information about your sign-up:

 Name: The name of the item to sign-up (required)

Quantity: Enter the amount of items that are available for sign-up (required)

Limit: Enter a limit of the number of items a user can bring for this item. If blank, then no limit is set, other than the current quantity remaining.

Description: Enter a description about this item

Display: Set this to hide if you wish to temporarily hide this item from sign-ups.  You can change the display setting later.

Click the "Add Item" to add the item for sign-up. You can re-order items by clicking and dragging them up or down.

Custom Field Name: To add a custom text field or select list, enter a name for the field here.

Custom Field Options: To create a select list, enter a comma separated list of items.  For example, a shirt size selection could be entered as "Small,Medium,Large, X-Large".  If left blank, the custom field will act as a text field.

Custom Field Input Required?: Set to "Yes" to require the user to enter a value here.

 

Invite Friends

 Click the Invite Friends button on the page to display the box to send invites to your sign-up page:

Enter a list of e-mail addresses you want to send the invite to, then click the "Send Invite" button to send the e-mail invites.  Use the Friend Lists feature to keep lists of friends to re-use for future sign-up pages.

(Note: the administrator must enable the cron job feature for this feature to work)

Sign Up!

If enabled, event owners will receive an automatic e-mail when a person signs-up for an item. Owners can also edit or delete sign-ups created by others.

If enabled, users will receive a reminder e-mail prior to the event with a summary of their sign-up items.

 

Export Sign-Up Data

You can export the sign-up data at any time to either an Excel or CSV file. Click the "Excel" or "CSV" link to download the data.