Event Calendar Newsletter WordPress plugin released by Brian Hogg

 

I pushed out the usual Software Hamilton Events Newsletter, and unfortunately, as is often the case, there was an error, in this case a date/time error. Somehow, despite double checking, every time I push out a newsletter there seems to be one error. Maybe there’s just so much stuff going on in the Hamilton tech startup community that it’s inevitable now? 😉

In reality the problem is that I have the data in more than one place. Whenever you try to manually maintain or otherwise manipulate two sets of the same data it’s just asking for some kind of human error. Better to maintain it once and automatically generate any other representations.

Thankfully Brian Hogg (@BrianHogg) noticed the error and created a new WordPress plug-in called Event Calendar Newsletter plug-in to help solve the problem! The plug-in automatically generates newsletter campaign text based on the contents of WordPress event calendars (so far supporting The Event Calendar and Ajax Event Calendar).

This really helps me – thanks Brian! But it can obviously help anyone in the same boat too. Maybe you can use it on your WordPress website and/or pass it along to someone who may be interested?

I don’t know what his long term plans are for the plug-in, but I think it has potential as a freemium product, with some of the extra proposed features below included for a fee.

 

Plug-in page: wordpress.org/plugins/event-calendar-newsletter

 

Plug-in details

Take your events calendar feed and turn it into newsletter-friendly text! No more manual copying and pasting from your calendar.

Compatible with:

– The Events Calendar
– Ajax Event Calendar

Is your calendar not supported or looking for other features? Let me know in the support threads and I’ll see what I can do! Contributions also welcome.

Some additional features I’m considering:

– Easier text formatting
– Conditional formatting tags (ie. to show certain text for start time and end time, only if it’s not an all-day event)
– Support for additional event calendars (such as Google Calendar)
– Direct integration with MailChimp, Constant Contact, and others to create newsletters
– Support for outputting events newsletter into a custom post type

But let me know in the support threads or by email what features you’d like to see.