With the rising demand for digital ticketing, businesses need a calendar on their website to host online events and enable online bookings.
Fortunately, Sugar Calendar is an all-in-one event calendar tool for tracking and scheduling events. Whether you’re hosting in-person events or online webinars, this could be a handy tool for your website.
Here’s a look at this plugin’s features:
Key Features
Sugar Calendar is an event calendar plugin for events, webinars, or conferences. If you’ve RSVP-ed to an online event, you’ve probably seen businesses present their current and upcoming events in a calendar format.
By installing the Sugar Calendar plugin, you can also get a calendar within your WordPress dashboard.
Sugar Calendar lets users assign a date, time, and specific categories to events. You can even schedule recurring events and single or multi-day events.
Besides working as a scheduler, it also has pro-add-ons for selling and managing event tickets, syncing calendar feeds and integrating with event registration plugins.
Overall, Sugar Calendar includes the following features:
- Event management
- Event categories
- Recurring events
- Start and end times
- Single and multi-day events
- Translation-ready
- Pro add-ons
- Event ticketing
- Calendar feeds
- Event URLs
- Frontend Event submissions
- Advanced recurring events (coming soon)
You can also expand Sugar Calendar functionalities through free add-ons.
These include the following:
- WP All Import – Importing events from CSV or Excel files
- Google Maps – Displaying event location
- Ninja Forms Form Embed & Gravity Forms Embed – add event registration forms and accept online payments
Bottomline is: It has everything you need to schedule and manage online events.
Sugar Calendar Pricing
The most affordable plan is the “Personal” plan which includes access to free add-ons, core updates, plugin updates and email support for one site at $49 per year.
Use Sugar Calendar, the all-in-one event calendar tool for tracking and scheduling events.
Get the pluginTo access all pro add-ons for unlimited sites, opt for their Professional plan worth $199 per year.
Getting Started
Now, let’s figure out how to use Sugar Calendar for WordPress.
To get started, here’s what you need to do:
- Register for an account at Sugar Calendar
- Choose a subscription plan (they have a 30-day money-back guarantee and a refund policy)
- Install the Sugar Calendar plugin on WordPress.org
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Creating a Calendar
The Calendar dashboard on WordPress looks like this:
The plugin has several features, which we’ll discuss later. Now, we’ll start by creating a new Calendar.
Just click the Calendars tab in the upper left corner.
Type the name and description of the calendar. You can also include a URL-friendly slug or assign a custom color to your calendar. In this example, we created a calendar titled, “Webinar schedule”.
When you’re done, click Add New Calendar.
Creating an Event
Now that you’ve successfully created a calendar, it’s time to create an event.
First, go to Calendar > Add New in the WordPress sidebar.
In this page, you’ll be able to specify the duration, location and recurrence of the event.
The Duration fields include the event date, start time, and the time it finishes.
Head to the Recurrence tab if you’re creating a recurring event. An event can recur per week, month or year.
Next, you can add the location of the event but this is optional.
To add the event to a calendar, go to the Calendars section in the sidebar. Click the “Webinar schedule” option to add it to the calendar we created in the previous steps.
And, that’s it! You’ve finally created an event.
Displaying Your Calendar
To display the Calendar onyour WordPress site, add the short code [sc_events_calendar] to any post or page.
In this example, we’ve pasted the shortcode on a dedicated landing page. Once you click the “Update” option, the Calendar will appear in your website’s landing page.
Pro Add-ons
There are also two Pro add-ons available for users opting for their Professional and Ultimate plan—Frontend Event Submissions, Calendar Feeds, Event URLs, and Event Ticketing add-on. These are primarily for websites using the plugin to host online events and sell tickets.
For this article, we’ll dive in on the Event URLs and Event Ticketing Add-ons.
Event URLs
The Event URLs section lets you add URLs to your event page (if any).
This section includes the following fields:
- URL – the link to the event
- Redirect – Checking this option will automatically send site visitors to the previously specified event URLs
- Target – Checking this option will open the event link to a new tab
- Text – lets you include a custom text with a hyperlink to the event page, instead of the plain URL
Event Ticketing
Users selling tickets for their event can visit the Event Ticketing section and check the “Enable Tickets Sales” option. Afterward, indicate the price per ticket and the amount of tickets available.
Now that event ticketing is enabled, connect your Stripe account to process payment.
Besides Stripe, Sugar Calendar has direct integration with WooCommerce Checkout. This enables site owners to accept payments from 100+ payment gateways. This is a huge advantage for businesses catering to the international market.
You can head to their documentation site to view step-by-step instructions for WooCommerce checkout.
Then head to the Emails section, which is also under the Tickets category.
Here, you can add the email address where notifications will be sent from, as well as the person or business name.
Scroll down to create the order receipt email that you’ll send to site visitors who booked a ticket.
Final Thoughts
I personally admire how fast and easy it is to use the Sugar Calendar.
You can instantly create a calendar and events. In addition, you can immediately specify the duration, location, event URLs, and other event information through the easy-to-use Calendar section.
Site visitors can get a complete overview of the event’s specifics, which may significantly boost event sign-ups. The plugin comes with a no-hassle purchasing and online booking process.
There’s also no need to worry about embed codes and adding events. With Sugar Calendar, you can create multiple calendars and add specific events for each calendar.
You can head to the Sugar Calendar’s website to get started and try it yourself.
