A best practice, when you're implementing Trumba® Connect, is to keep your implementation as simple as possible. That means using the smallest number of event categories and types that you can get away with.
What are event categories and event templates?
If you promote a large number of events, however, and/or one or more of your event categories are broad, it may be helpful to your site visitors to sub-categorize events. For example, if you have a general Sports category, you may want to create a sub-category for each sport to make it easier for site visitors to limit events only to the sport they care about.
In the rest of this topic, you'll learn how to:
When you're creating sub-categories, follow the same rule of thumb you use with categories: create the smallest number you can get away with.
I haven't even created my categories yet.
The total number of sub-categories you create depends upon your specific implementation. For example, you may want to sub-categorize only one of your categories or you may want to sub-categorize them all.
If you publish a large number of events and expect a large number of page views, you'll get the best performance if you create sub-categories using a custom field.
This is the Current Publication list for a media organization that publishes lots of events that get large numbers of hits. This organization should create sub-categories using custom fields.
If you don't anticipate performance issues and/or you intend to use only a small number of sub-categories, create the sub-categories using sub-calendars.
This is the Current Publication list for a university. Because this organization will create sub-categories only for Athletics events and performance isn't expected to be a problem, it will create sub-categories using sub-calendars.
A sub-calendar appears as a child of its parent calendar in the Current Publication list.
The Football calendar is a sub-calendar of the Athletics calendar.
A field is a piece of descriptive information about an event. By creating a sub-category custom field, you give event creators the ability to assign a specific sub-category to each event they create. This in turn makes it possible for visitors to your published calendar to limit the events they see by sub-category.
The following procedures explain how to create a sub-category custom field and how to add the field to the event template or templates that you're using to create events.
This ensures that event creators assign only one sub-category to each event.
This makes it mandatory for event creators to assign a sub-category to each event they create.
Allow this field to be published Select this option if you want your site visitors to see sub-category listed as a field when they view details for events on your published calendar. If you don't want sub-category listed in event details, clear the option.
Show this field on the public submit event form Select this option if you are using the Trumba Connect Event Submission form and you want event submitters to select a sub-category for each event they submit. Otherwise, clear the option.
Or, if you haven't created an event template, click Create a new template.
If you're creating a new event template, on the Create a New Event Template page, provide the template name, description, and owning calendar. Under Predefined Fields and User Defined Fields, select the fields you want to include in the event template, including the sub-category field, and then click Add Fields to Template.
I'd like more detail about creating new event templates.
If you have a relatively large number of sub-categories, you may want to simplify the event creation process by associating sub-categories with specific categories (calendars).
The advantage of associating sub-categories with specific categories is that it lessens the risk that event creators will assign inappropriate sub-categories to events.
For example, suppose you create a sub-category custom field that lists a relatively large number of sub-categories. If you don't associate each sub-category with a specific calendar, event creators have to scroll through a long and largely inappropriate list each time they try to assign a sub-category to an event.
This comprehensive list forces event creators to pick a single appropriate sub-category from among a large collection of inappropriate ones.
If you associate each sub-category with a specific calendar, however, event creators see only a short list of appropriate sub-categories each time they add a new event.
The sub-category list now contains only sub-categories appropriate for the Arts & Crafts calendar.
You associate sub-categories with specific categories using custom field overrides.
Remember that, in Trumba Connect, each calendar you create corresponds to a category.
If you set up the sub-category custom field overrides correctly, you should see only sub-categories that are appropriate for the displayed calendar.
How you allow site visitors to filter events by sub-category depends upon whether you set up the sub-categories as:
When sub-categories are sub-calendars, you allow site visitors to filter events by sub-category by adding a Calendar List spud to the page on your website where you embedded your published calendar.
We created sub-category sub-calendars as children of the Athletics calendar and then created this Calendar List spud.
To publish a Calendar List spud so site visitors can limit events by sub-category
With a sub-category custom field in place, you can add a Filter spud to the page on your website where you embedded your published calendar. This filter allows site visitors to limit the events they see on your published calendar by sub-category.
To publish a Filter spud so site visitors can limit events by sub-category
Experiment with both. Click the Preview button to see which you prefer.
