UCF Events Tools and Resources

Using the Events System

http://events.ucf.edu is the online location for listing and promoting UCF events. The UCF events system makes it easy for you to create events listings and share events with the UCF community. Any occurrence that has a start date and specific location can be entered as an event. A carefully constructed title, start date & time, category-type and location are all required for submitting an event into the system.

The intuitive administrative console makes publishing events and calendars on your website simple; or you can recommend an event for publication on the main site. If your website promotes UCF events - including lectures, receptions, speakers, meetings, and shows, the UCF events system can help your users find this information and easily add it to their own calendars. Here’s what you can do with the new UCF events system:

• Get a unique events calendar for yourself or your UCF organization
• Add, edit, and manage your upcoming events
• Recommend events for posting on the main UCF web site
• Share events with other organizations on campus
• Display a calendar on your site

As with any IT system at UCF, use of the Events System is governed by the Division of Information Technologies and Resources Use of Information Technology and Resources Policy. Please be sure you have reviewed and understand this policy before logging in and entering content in the Events System.

Logging In

The login for the events system is located at https://eventsadmin.smca.ucf.edu/, and requires a UCF NID and password.

If you are unsure of what your NID is, you may look it up using the NID lookup tool. If you don't know the password associated with that NID, you may reset it using the NID password reset tool. You will need your UCF ID card to complete the password reset.

If you have issues with retrieving your NID or resetting your password, please contact the Service Desk at 407-823-5117.

Posting an Event

To submit an event choose "Create Event" from the manager screen and enter in the event details. If you would like to share your event with other calendars within the UCF Events system, choose Public under "Event Sharing Status" as shown below.

Additionally you can choose to "recommend" your event for the main university calendar. See the section below for more information

Access to Calendars

Getting Access to Department Calendar

Obtaining access to a particular calendar requires that you request access from whoever owns it. They may provide you access through the steps detailed below.

Granting Access to Your Calendar

For other users to gain access to your calendar, you must explicitly provide them with permission through the manager interface. To add a user first log in to the UCF Events Manager. From here click on the "Users & Permissions" link located in the manager menu.

With the permissions page up, select the user you wish to add from the "User ID" drop down menu.

Once the user is selected, click the "Add User" button to finish. You can verify as well as remove the user added by checking the permissions table located on the "Users & Permissions" page.

Posting to the Main Web Site

If you wish to post your event to the main calendar for UCF, when you create or edit your event, ensure that the box labeled "Please consider event for the main calendar" is checked.

This will make the event available for review, and pending approval, will show up on the main calendar.

The events are reviewed 3 times a week. Before an event is posted to the main calendar/distributed via Good Morning UCF, we check each event for spelling and language. We also ask the following:

• Does it have an engaging title that makes sense?
• Is there a defined date/time and location for the event?
• Is there a description that will help users understand what the event is and whether it is something that they want to participate in?
• Is it relevant/of interest to the UCF community?

If an event meets these criteria, it is approved.

Events Widget

Requirements

UCF Events include is built as a jQuery plugin.

Download

While not required for usage, the widget source can be downloaded to be installed locally. Download UCF Events plugin (.zip file).

Instructions

1. In the header, link the javascript and stylesheet: <!-- jQuery is required -->
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<!-- Widget Includes -->
<script src="http://events.ucf.edu/tools/script.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<link href="http://events.ucf.edu/tools/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
2. Place where you want the widgets to display: <div class="events">
    <a href="http://events.ucf.edu/">View Calendar</a>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">$(function(){$(".events").eventsUCF();});</script>

List Display

Screenshot:

Calendar Display

Screenshot:

Plugin Settings

All are optional.

Options are attached to the event widget using data attributes.

Example: <div class="events" data-limit="5" data-calendar-id="7" >
    <a href="http://events.ucf.edu/">View Calendar</a>
</div>

Server-side Widget

Sometimes browser security concerns make cross-site requests such as the ones the events widget does either undesirable or impossible. In those cases you can create a server-side proxy to handle the request for you. This method will allow you to continue using the events widget scripts and styles, with the only changes being the addition of the server-side script and changing the events widget data-url attribute.

Below you will find an example server-side proxy written in PHP and the html/javascript required to use it.

Example

ajax_proxy.php:

<?php

$events_url   = "http://events.ucf.edu";
$query_string = http_build_query($_GET);
$events_data  = file_get_contents($events_url.'?'.$query_string);

if ($events_data){
	print $events_data;
}

?>

Once the server-side script is deployed, you can point the current events widget to it using the data-url attribute:

local.html:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>Events Include - Using Proxy</title>
    
    <!-- jQuery required -->
	<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
    
    <!-- UCF Events Calendar -->
	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../style.css" media="all">
	<script type="text/javascript" src="../script.js"></script>
    
    <!-- use plugin, with settings -->
    <script type="text/javascript">
    $(function(){        
        $('.events').eventsUCF({
            'limit'        : 7,
            'calendar_id'  : 1
        });
    });
    </script>
    
</head>
<body>

    <div class="events" data-url="../ajax_proxy.php">
        <a href="http://events.ucf.edu/">View Calendar</a>
    </div>

</body>
</html>

Demo

Proxy Demo - Uses the code displayed above