Did you know that a WordPress calendar plugin can extend the popular WordPress CMS with really cool calendar and events capabilities.
WordPress is a very straightforward and easy to use blogging system which offers many great features in the basic/standard installation. If you want additional functionality and more advanced control of specific parts of WordPress you can extend the capabilities by installing plugins.
If you’re running an online business which requires visitors or customers to be able to book hotel rooms, apartments or any other service you offer you are very dependent on your online booking or calendar system. WordPress standard calendar might not offer the functionality you need and this is where a dedicated WordPress calendar plugin is the perfect way to meet your requirements.
Remember that a dedicated WordPress form plugin also can help your visitors contact you in an easy way and that social network plugins are essential to drive more traffic to your site are essential to drive more traffic to your site.
There are different kinds of calendars you can install depending on your particular business area. Event calendars allows you to add important dates and upcoming events for your visitors to see, there are booking calendars which allows visitors to book services, rooms, apartments or the like. And there are even calendars that will make scheduling of posts to be published a lot easier by dragging and dropping them onto the desired days in an interactive backend calendar.
Premium WordPress calendar plugins typically offers clean visual designs, build on solid architectural frameworks with powerful features to create the content you want and backend systems that are easy to use. Add to that a dedicated support which will help you in case you get into trouble or have questions. Free plugins don’t always offer these kind of advanced features and support but often fulfill the most basic needs.
In this article I present a mix of effective and stylish free and premium WordPress calendar plugins. If you want to get serious about your online business you really need to consider adding a dedicated WordPress calendar plugin in order to enhance the efficiency of your business.
This post has just been updated with new excellent plugins and all links have been checked. Enjoy reading!
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through those links (at no extra cost to you). I recommend that you do your own independent research before purchasing any product or service. This article is not a guideline, a recommendation or endorsement of specific products.
[exec]$filestr = file_get_contents(‘http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/googleadsensebelowmoretag.inc’);echo $filestr;[/exec]
Calendarize it for WordPress
A powerful Calendar and Event plugin for WordPress which is a feature rich Calendar and Event plugin, which targets a very broad audience. Easy Point and Click interface to add new events. One of the best and most recent calendars.
MORE INFO / DEMO by Codecanyon (premium plugin)
Business Calendar – WordPress Internal Calendar
Power up your wordpress website creating a full featured calendar for each WordPress user. Cooperating with other users has never be so simple. Transforms wordpress in a real working platform: create your calendar, share it with other users and invite them to your events. Everything is simple and just need few clicks.
MORE INFO / DEMO by Codecanyon (premium plugin)
WordPress Pro Event Calendar
The Pro Event Calendar plugin adds a professional and sleek calendar to your posts or pages. 100% Responsive, also you can use it inside a widget.
MORE INFO / DEMO by Codecanyon (premium plugin)
AJDE Event Calendar – WP Plugin
Event calendar plugin for wordpress that utilizes WP’s custom post type. This plugin integrate eventbrite API to create paid events, add limited capacity to events, and accept payments for paid events or allow registration for free events. This plugin will add an AJAX driven calendar with month-view of events to front-end of your website. Events on front-end can be sorted by date or title. You can easily add events with multiple attributes and customize the calendar layout or build your own calendar using event post meta data.
MORE INFO / DEMO by Codecanyon (premium plugin)
Localendar Calendar for WordPress
A powerful calendar with Month/Week/Day block and list views, “Today + Happening Soon”, and a mini-calendar widget. Fully customizable.
MORE INFO by WordPress.org (free plugin)
WordPress Events Calendar
Professional and elegant plugin that adds an Event Calendar to your posts or pages. It has an elegant and sleek design, languages support and is cross browser compatible. It features multi calendars in a page or post, upcoming events widget, is simple to customize and is well documented.
MORE INFO / DEMO by Codecanyon (premium plugin)
Timeliner
WordPress Timeliner is a powerful plugin, which generates a timeline based on events. What is an event? Well, it can be anything with a date stamp on it – a news article, a blog post, a portfolio item, you name it. If it has a date, Timeliner understands it! From the options page you can specify how many posts to get from the database and you can also choose one or more categories to get the posts from. Timeliner comes with two unique designs to begin with, and it’s also easily customizable with CSS.
MORE INFO / DEMO by Codecanyon (premium plugin)
Booking System PRO (WordPress Plugin)
This Plugin will help you to easily create a booking/reservation system your WordPress website or blog.
MORE INFO / DEMO by Codecanyon (premium plugin)
WordPress Multiple Events Calendar with Countdown
WordPress Flash minimalistic calendar with events is build with minimalism and functionality in mind. It offers a clean, small events calendar that still have the ability to offer some information and even a preview image for the event. You can add events via our custom admin panel. Simply upload an image with WordPress upload form, add your title and content text, choose the appropriate color and url link and save the event. The admin panel is a live preview which provides you the ability to check the changes without refreshing your website.
MORE INFO / DEMO by Codecanyon (premium plugin)
Booking Calendar
This WordPress plugin will enable online booking services for your site. Visitors to your site will be able to check availability of apartments, houses, hotel rooms, or services you offer. They can also make reservations and appointments with the ability to choose from multi-day, single day, or by the hour booking. Your clients can even view and register for upcoming events. With integrated payment support of popular payment systems your clients can pay online.
MORE INFO by WordPress.org (free plugin)
Events Manager
Events Manager is a full-featured event registration plugin for WordPress based on the principles of flexibility, reliability and powerful features! Includes recurring events, locations management, calendar, Google map integration, booking management.
MORE INFO by WordPress.org (free plugin)
All-in-One Event Calendar
The All-in-One Event Calendar is a new way to list your events in WordPress and easily share them with the rest of the world. This new calendar system combines a clean visual design, solid architectural patterns and a powerful set of features to create the most advanced calendar system available for WordPress. Best of all: it’s completely free.
MORE INFO by WordPress.org (free plugin)
Carsten started writing for Tripwiremagazine in 2011 and is a blogger who likes to write about WordPress topics, web design, photography, blogging, new tech stuff, gadgets, gaming etc.
I would like to recommend CalPress Pro WordPress Calendar plugin http://www.calpresspro.com/. Carsten, I can guarantee it’s worth looking into. 😀 Regards!
Oops forgot something … ofcourse I can make a link with https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/3033039 but I need it also for Outlook, Yahoo and iCal and I want it packed in a WordPress plugin.
Cheers,
Hans
Hi,
I’m looking for a plugin that simply generates a link. When people click this link a meeting or event is added to their Google -, Outlook -, Yahoo – or iCal Calender.
Hope you can help me.
Cheers,
Hans Anders
I didn’t seem mention of a calendar for non-profit organizations which allows for a sign-up, e.g. how many in a family will attend, perhaps what food they are bringing, etc.
Thanks for the review!
Thanks for all the details. I am looking for a “Responsive” calendar to manage Scout training, meeting, and other events. Free is good… it would be awesome if you added a comment about how the plug-in works with a 2011 WP design for example… does it auto resize, or mess up the design… Thanks again Carsten!
I have a wedding business and would like prospective clients to be able to check our availability by plugging in their date on our website. I don’t want to show a whole calendar where they can see how many bookings we have though, just a function that will tell them whether or not a particular date is available. Anyone know of a plugin for this?
Wow I thought my options were more limited. I’ve started to use one calendar (Sugar Events Calendar) after having some issues with core calendar files within the Timely All In One Calendar. But I would like to know how to transfer all my events to a new plugin say I change to something else.
I’m having calendar overload! I do like the Modern Tribe events calendar BUT still seeking the “magic” plug-in that will allow a pay-to-post option AND the option of running TWO different calendars on my site. Any thoughts?
Hi,
Thank you for such a valuable sharing.
I have a question;
I look for a calender plugin for my client with such a feature;
When user click an event from calender, it has to go wordpess existing post/page, not to event page.
Is this possible at any calender plugin, free or premium?
Thanks at advance for your help.
Regards
Thanks for this good information.
Please give information about independent PHP MySQL event calendar scripts (free) also as it will be very much helpful to many people.
Which to you think would work best as a booking system for a bus service. choosing destinations, start date, end date?
Thanks for the list. Hoping I can find a better solution that just Google calendar
Hi David –
Actually, we would like to put our Google calendar on our site using a WordPress plugin. Do you know of one that works well? We used to be on WordPress.com and had a solution, but it doesn’t work anymore.
Thanks!
I would like to recommend Appointment-Calendar. It s free appointment calendar plugin for wordpress.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/appointment-calendar/
I found this is totally free & ideal plugin so far for my business.
Thanks Ankit for this great plugin.
Andy
Hey Andy,
Thanks for the kind words….Glad to know that you find Appointment Calendar useful 🙂
-Ankit
Perfect!!!
This suits to my client’s all needs and also multilingual too.
Thanks @Ankit Das
BW
Su Chang
[…] tripwiremagazine.com/2012/05/wordpress-calendar-plugins.html […]
First of all thanks for this post. All this plugins really looks really cool. My wordpress will get a new look with this.
I’d like to recommend http://www.wphotelbooking.com
Regards!!
Thanks for your recommendation Jose.
I will take a look at it for my next article update.
Thanks for putting this list together. I’m quite surprised that you don’t include the Events Calendar from Modern Tribe. I have been researching this one and looks like the best to meet my needs: strong developer group; easy to launch calendar. Perhaps you can add it to your next review.
Thanks – Michelle
Thank you very much for your comment Michelle!
I will certainly take a look at it for my next review/update.
Kind regards, Carsten
Wow – you missed our new calendar plugin by 3 days:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/localendar-for-wordpress/
localendar has been providing web calendars for over 12 years now, and we finally have a WordPress plugin (people used to just embed our HTML). Perhaps you can take a closer look if you refresh your list.
I just tried to use Localendar again, and it’s more messed up now than before. More than half the time I get messages about IP flooding instead of the calendar.
The cosmetics of your calendar are good. It’s what’s under the hood that seems whacko.
I tried Localendar and spent days and days, wrote for help, can’t log in, actually 3 separate individuals/usernames of us tried and all 3 today could not get logged in. Seemingly we are non existing, although we all are trying to put a calendar together, one on a website and 2 personal calendars. We never got any help or answers to our emails and support forums questions. Have to look for another interactive calendar for frontend users to be able to add their events.
Greate list of WP plugins calendar 😉 Helpful indeed…
Thanks for your comment and glad I could help!
Wow, something I never ever thought I would hear myself saying, but, amazing calendars 🙂