Tutorial - 4-H County Events Calendar
With so many county events taking place, it is no longer feasible to manually enter events for each county on our standard County Events Calendar page. We can automate this process by having individual counties create event entries within their 4hOnline account. 4hOnline is the enrollment software that replaced Blue Ribbon, and fairly soon, all of our 4-H events registration systems will also be incorporated into this valuable and useful tool.
Who Is This Tutorial For?
This tutorial is for any county staff individual who has access to their county's 4hOnline account, and who also wishes to inform the public of the 4-H events that will be held in their county each year.
What Will This Tutorial Teach You?
In this tutorial, we will perform the following actions:
- Log into your 4hOnline account
- Access your existing county calendar
- Learn how to rename your calendar if need be and edit the calendar description
- Learn how to add an event listing
- Watch in amazement as your event is automatically displayed in our County 4-H Events Calendar
- Learn how users can filter out counties and view information for only their county
- Learn about how to create your own publicly viewable calendar and post it on your website
- What to do if I get stuck... Need Help?
To give you an idea of where we are going with this, here is the new 4-H County Events Calendar:
http://www.colorado4h.org/countyevents
Please take a look so that you can see what the end product will look like.
Let's Begin
Step 1: Log Into Your 4hOnline Account
Open your web browser and point it to https://colorado.4honline.com. Log in using your county credentials to 4hOnline.
If for some reason you do not know your county login credentials, please contact Joy.Bauder@ColoState.Edu.
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Step 2: Access Your Existing County Calendar
Once you have logged in, look in the upper right section and locate the Calendar icon. Click on the Calendar icon. (See below)
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In the upper left region, you will see a series of links; click the Calendars link. (See below)
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Step 3: Edit the Calendar Description (only if you need to)
Now you will be looking at a list of calendars (some counties may have more than one calendar that will be displayed in the list; other counties will have only one calendar). At the time when each of your county accounts were created in 4hOnline, a "default calendar" was also created for you; we have hopefully re-named all of your default calendars to your county name. For example, the calendar for Adams County would be called "Adams County".
At the beginning of this tutorial, you clicked on our new County Events Calendar. If you scroll down to the bottom of that page, you will see the names of all of the calendars that are linked into our County Events Calendar. Each county's main calendar is linked into this "master" calendar, which we call a "view". Your main county calendar has been renamed using your county name; this naming convention was established for the benefit of our website users so that they could filter content based on which county they want to look at. Throughout this tutorial, our examples will be using a fictitious county called "Demo County". So as you can see below, the name of our fictitious county calendar is "Demo County". (See below)
Should you wish to edit the description, you could click on the Edit button, and edit the calendar information. Please leave your calendar name as Adams County, or whatever your County name might be. If you change the calendar name, it will no longer be linked into our "master" calendar view.
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Step 4: Add An Event Listing
Now that you see where your county calendar lives, let's add an event that will be displayed on the calendar. Click on the Events icon. (See below)
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To add an event, click on the "Add Event" link near the upper left side. (See below) Please note that at the time of the writing of this document, the events registration portion of 4hOnline has been turned off. We will eventually utilize this feature for our various registration systems (such as State Conference, LDC, Camp Tobin, etc.). Just know that for now, you will be able to add events to 4hOnline (without the registration component) and they will be listed in your county calendar.
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Once you have clicked on Add Event, you will be presented with various options for your event. This first section is important. The items that you should fill out are as follows:
- Event Title (enter the title of your event)
- Type (select "Standard")
- Calendar (make sure to associate this with your county calendar; example: "Adams County")
(See below)
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You don't have to worry about this next section for the time being. This section will become more important once events registration starts taking place through 4hOnline. (See below)
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The next 4 screenshots pertain to selecting the date and time of the event.
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Click on the little calendar icon and you will be presented with a calendar that will allow you to select the START DATE of your event. Perform the same actions to specify the END DATE for your event. (See below)
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Specify the Start and End times for your event Start and End dates using the drop down menus. (See below)
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Disregard the Setup and Cleanup items for now. (See below)
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Similar to how you might set up a repeating item in your Outlook calendar, you can also specify that this event repeats at the same time each year. If this is the case for your event, please feel free to fill this section out accordingly; otherwise, just leave the "Do not repeat" option selected. (See below)
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IMPORTANT - This is where you type in the description for your event. It's going to be difficult to communicate every little detail about your event in this section, so it's often times a good idea to create some sort of flyer, convert it to PDF and post it on your web server somewhere. Provide the URL to your flyer here in the text box. (See below)
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You will also want to list contact information for an individual who can answer questions about the event. This person may be yourself, or possibly someone else in your office.
Once you have finished entering in your information on this page, check to make sure that everything has been filled out the way that you want it. If you are sure that all information has been filled in correctly, then click on the Save button to save this event. (See below)
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Step 5: Watch in Amazement as Your Event Appears in the State 4-H County Events Calendar
Once you have saved your event, assuming that you have correctly associated your event with the correct calendar for your county, your event listing will appear on the State County Events page: http://www.colorado4h.org/countyevents/ (See below)
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Step 6: Learn How Users Can Filter County Calendar Content
If you scroll down within the State County Events page, you will see a listing of all of the calendars that are being pulled into this "view". If you do not see that your event has been listed on this page, make sure that you associated your event with the calendar name that is appropriate for your county by locating your county calendar name at the bottom of this calendar view.
Please note that anyone who is viewing this page can filter content by county simply by de-selecting boxes for counties that they do not wish to view. Please read the notes in the screenshot image for further details. (See below)
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During times when multiple counties are listing events on the same days, the individual cell that represents a particular day will grow in height to accommodate the listing of all of the events. Below is a screenshot from the Texas State 4-H Calendar. (See below)
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What About Your Own Calendar View?
Step 7: What if you want to create a publicly viewable calendar for your own county?
Go back to your 4hOnline account and from the Calendar page. (See below)
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We mentioned before that the State 4-H County Events Calendar is a "view" that basically pulls in event information from each county. In order to make a public version of your county calendar, you will need to create a "view" of that calendar. Select "Add View" from the Calendar page in your 4hOnline account. (See below)
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Create a title for your calendar "view", and also give it a brief description. Then select the one calendar that you wish to make public, or if you have multiple calendars that you wish to link to this "view", then select them. (as illustrated in our example below) Then click the Create button to create your new publicly viewable calendar. (See below)
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After clicking the Create button, your settings will be saved, and you will be presented with a box of text near the bottom of the page. Highlight this text with your mouse, and copy it. (See below)
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Next, open up your favorite text or web page editor, such as Dreamweaver, Notepad, or Wordpad, and paste the text into the text editor. In our example below, we have used a simple text editor similar to Notepad. Now, save the file; give it a sensible file-name, and make sure to give it a .htm or .html file extension when you save it. You can see that I called mine "4heventscal.html". (See below)
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Finally, you can copy this file to your web server and link the page to the navigation menu on your website. Notice in the screenshot below that users have the ability to navigate to the past or future using the forward and reverse buttons near the top of the page. (See below)
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Need Help?
Although there is a lot of information listed on this page, please do not be overwhelmed by it; the process really is fairly simple. We have tried to provide you with screenshot images that will help walk you through every step of the way. If you have problems with performing any of what has been described above, please feel free to contact Darrin Goodman at darrin.goodman@colostate.edu
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