How to Run a Community Events Calendar on WordPress

A community events calendar is one of the most useful things a local website can offer — and one of the easiest to let go stale. This guide covers setting one up on WordPress for a town, neighbourhood group, residents’ association or nonprofit, and the routines that keep it worth visiting.

In short: decide what counts as a “community event”, set up categories people actually browse by, collect events through a simple form, and give one person a weekly slot to publish and tidy.

Decide what belongs on the calendar

The best community calendars have a clear scope. Write it down and put it on the page:

  • Where: your town, a set of neighbourhoods, or “within 10 miles”.
  • What: free and low-cost events open to the public? Ticketed shows too? Club meetings?
  • Who can submit: anyone, or only member organisations?

A short “What we list” paragraph above the calendar saves a lot of awkward emails.

Step 1: Install and configure

Install Monthly Events Calendar from Plugins → Add New Plugin. In Events Calendar → Settings, set your local timezone and the date format your area uses — day/month or month/day matters more than you’d think.

Step 2: Categories people browse by

Visitors think in terms of what kind of thing and who it’s for. Use categories for the first and tags for the second:

  • Categories: Arts & culture, Markets & fairs, Sport & fitness, Talks & learning, Volunteering, Family, Meetings.
  • Tags: free, kids, accessible, outdoors, dog-friendly.

Each category and tag gets its own calendar page — /events-tag/free/ is a page many people will bookmark. Categories and tags

Step 3: Venues and organizers

Community events reuse the same places — the library, the park, the village hall — and the same groups. Save each as a venue or organizer once, with address and contact details, and they appear on every event page. When a hall changes its phone number, you update it in one place. Venues and organizers

Step 4: Collect events from the community

Monthly Events Calendar doesn’t include a public submission form, and that’s usually fine: a simple form plus a quick review keeps spam and mistakes off the calendar.

  1. Create a form with your usual form plugin (WPForms, Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, Fluent Forms…). Ask for: event name, date and time, venue and address, organiser and contact, a two-line description, a link, and an image.
  2. Put it on a “Submit an event” page and link to it from the calendar page.
  3. Each week, add the submissions as events and publish.

If you’d like submitted events to be created as drafts automatically, several form plugins can create posts of any type — point them at the Events post type and review drafts under Events Calendar → All Events.

Step 5: Publish and promote the calendar

  • Put the month view on an Events page and the list view on your homepage.
  • Link to category pages from relevant places — the Family category from your “Things to do with kids” page, for example.
  • When you share an event, share its page: it has the date, venue and an Add to Calendar button. Promoting events on your website
List view of upcoming events with date badges, times and venues
The list view gives each event room for a description.

Step 6: Keep it current

A stale calendar loses visitors quickly. A weekly routine:

  1. Add new submissions.
  2. Check the next two weeks: anything cancelled or changed?
  3. Remove or mark events that didn’t happen.
  4. Make sure there’s something on every weekend for the next month — if not, ask your regular organisers.

Accessibility counts

Community calendars serve everyone, including people using screen readers or phones with large text. Write descriptive titles, include access information in descriptions (step-free access, hearing loop, quiet times) and add alt text to event images. Our accessible events calendar checklist has more.

Keep reading

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