Hello Mark,

Hm, I am not too sure if I understand this actually. How does this work with JReviews?

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your reply and I hope, consideration.

if you imagine, many of us already have our main content outside of EasySocial, whether this be simple Joomla articles, Jreviews listings, K2 content etc. You have real estate websites, city guides, dating websites, product websites and much more.

I don't know about K2 etc, but Jreviews listings are just regular Joomla articles, so anything that works with a core Joomla article, should work with a Jreviews listing.

To keep things simple, lets look at a few scenarios.

SCENARIO 1
Michael runs a successful website for car enthusiasts. Members have pages that show off their own cars, listings of racing circuits, specialist motor car and accessory dealer directory and more. The site uses EasySocial for it's membership and social activities, EasyDiscuss for the forum and EasyBlog.

Members regally arrange meet ups all over the world, which are usually held at one of the racing circuits or car dealers premises already listed on the website. Michael decides that an events system that is closely tied in with EasySocial would be perfect, as he can promote the event within EasySocial to members and people can see who is attending (just like JomSocial events).

Now here's were the integration comes in.

When Michael, a member or an admin creates an event in EasySocial Events, whilst completing the event details form, they are presented with a "Select A Related Joomla Article" field. In that field (a dynamic search field would be ideal), they would be able to select the name of any Joomla article. There is now a link between the EasySocial event ID and the Joomla article ID. This is what Alejandro describes in step 1. above

Now that we have the link, an already published module would be set to show on all listings (articles) in the "Racing Circuits" and "Car Dealers and Accessory Suppliers categories. This could equally be achieved with a content plugin. When Michael's members visits any page in one of these categories, the module or the content plugin will display a list of "Upcoming Events at This Venue". It would list in each row event name, description and date (this is what Alejandro describes in step 2.). Finally, two buttons, "Attend Event" and "More Information" would appear next to each entry, which would simply be a hyperlink to the selected Event's Information page within EasySocial.


SCENARIO 2
Jane runs a successful portal website which has a busy real estate section. Jane uses a Joomla component, which creates her page and displays all of the properties vendors and real estate agents have listed for sale.

Often the real estate agents hold open house days at properties or new housing developments, so prospective buyers can come and look around the house (or houses). As Jane has already heard good things about EasySocial, she decides deploy it and use the new Events functionality to create the open house days. By being presented with a "Select A Related Joomla Article" field whilst completing the event details form, she can select which house the event will be held at.

Now when a visitor views any house that has an open day linked to it, the module or the content plugin will display a list of "Upcoming Open House Days", with two buttons, "Attend Event" and "More Information" , which would simply be a hyperlink to the selected Event's Information page within EasySocial.

Summary
These are just two examples and there are many more I could name and I'm sure that EasySocial users could too. Many of us have spent a great amount of time developing good content, such as in the examples above and what better way to drive users to the social part of our websites. We will be able to use our existing content as we do now, whilst also leveraging the events capability of EasySocial.

A few important points

1. As the solution is not specific to any third-party component, so long as that component creates standard Joomla articles (as Jreviews does), it will work.
   
2. The solution involves just a few pieces of work from you guys. The inclusion of a field to allow selecting a Joomla article and the creation of an Events content plugin, module or both. This opens up lots of possibilities for many existing and prospective EasySocial customers.
   
3. A module is ideal, as it can be set to appear where we choose, but having a plugin as an option allows for flexibility.
   
4. Within the module, it would be good if you were be able to choose what is displayed and also the layout. E.g. Show event thumbnail image - yes/no, thumbnail size, show description, how many words of description to show and how many events to display - e.g. "display up to 5 matching events")
   
5. If there are no related events, the module should either display "No upcoming events" or hide itself (if that is possible).
   
6. "Nice to haves" would be the ability to select a date range, or have options to show "events happening up to XX days in the future", the ability to choose to show past events, how many tickets are left and "Who's Attending". The later would show the names and avatars of members who are attending.
   
7. You could have an "Other Info" button display on the event's information page within EasySocial that takes you to the related Joomla article linked to above.
   
8. Third-party developers will be able to use your approach to create similar plugins for their own systems. As an example. I can imagine an e-commerce website that will host product launches and demonstration days.
   

Other ideas based on this approach

1. Why not develop a similar module or plugin which allows EasyBog, bloggers to link to events and someone creating an event to link to a blog?
   
2. You could also develop a "Discuss this event" plugin that links to an EasyDiscuss forum discussion topic.
   

Do let me know Mark if I can help at all, if you have any questions, or if you need me to clarify anything.

This would be awesome

Mark.

Hello Mark,

Oh wow, so much to process and consume in a single post :x Let me just try to summarize the above, in short when creating an event,article or group, the person can select articles that are related to that object? It sounds like you are trying to associate articles with the group. Why not create an app that actually allows allows the (group,event,page) admin / members to write their articles within the respective pages and display them on the pages itself? Wouldn't that be much less of a hassle?

Mark wrote:

Hello Mark,

Oh wow, so much to process and consume in a single post :x

Sorry, I could have been a bit more succinct

Mark wrote:in short when creating an event,article or group, the person can select articles that are related to that object?

In a nutshell, yes.

Although, I wasn't thinking about groups here, just events.

Mark wrote: It sounds like you are trying to associate articles with the group. Why not create an app that actually allows allows the (group,event,page) admin / members to write their articles within the respective pages and display them on the pages itself? Wouldn't that be much less of a hassle?

No, this is only to do with events.

Let my try and summarise my long post!

1. We have content on our websites (Joomla articles)
   
2. We will use the new events feature, due to be released in ES 1.3 to create new events
   
3. When creating a new event in ES, a field will allow you to associate that event with an existing Joomla article (one you already have, not one you intent to create later). This could be a venue for example.
   
4. Next, a module would be placed on that Joomla article's page which will show the ES event from point 3 above.
   

This should explain it visually. Below is a link to page on the Jreviews demo site:

http://demo.reviewsforjoomla.com/events/venues/arenas/madison-square-garden

The page is for a venue where events can be held. Can you see the section entitled "Events" at the bottom of the page? This is where the ES events would be shown using a module or content plugin.

Remember, Jreviews listings are Joomla articles with the addition of custom fields, so the principle is the same for any standard Joomla article.

Hopefully this is a little clearer!

Mark H wrote:

Mark wrote:

Hello Mark,

Oh wow, so much to process and consume in a single post :x

Sorry, I could have been a bit more succinct

Mark wrote:in short when creating an event,article or group, the person can select articles that are related to that object?

In a nutshell, yes.

Although, I wasn't thinking about groups here, just events.

Mark wrote: It sounds like you are trying to associate articles with the group. Why not create an app that actually allows allows the (group,event,page) admin / members to write their articles within the respective pages and display them on the pages itself? Wouldn't that be much less of a hassle?

No, this is only to do with events.

Let my try and summarise my long post!

1. We have content on our websites (Joomla articles)
   
2. We will use the new events feature, due to be released in ES 1.3 to create new events
   
3. When creating a new event in ES, a field will allow you to associate that event with an existing Joomla article (one you already have, not one you intent to create later). This could be a venue for example.
   
4. Next, a module would be placed on that Joomla article's page which will show the ES event you created in point 3 above.
   

This should explain it visually. Below is a link to page on the Jreviews demo site:

http://demo.reviewsforjoomla.com/events/venues/arenas/madison-square-garden

The page is for a venue where events can be held. Can you see the section entitled "Events" at the bottom of the page? This is where the ES events would be shown using a module or content plugin.

Remember, Jreviews listings are Joomla articles with the addition of custom fields, so the principle is the same for any standard Joomla article.

Hopefully this is a little clearer!

Ah, I see. I get what you mean now. So the module will actually be responsible to filter out modules that are related to the current venue because the venue is simply just an article in Joomla?

That's exactly it Mark and this is essentially what you where looking at on the demo that I linked to above.

You can see that the Events section on that page could be replaced with an EasySocial events module. It that would filter the events it shows by checking the current page's article ID, against any events where the article ID matches the article the user selected when creating their event.

All you would need the module to display would be the event name, date and a thumbnail image. An "Attend Event" button would be perfect.

There's lots of detail of what the module could ideally show in my epic long post above, which should make sense now, so I won't repeat it here

I'm guessing you would already have been thinking about creating a module to display "Upcoming Events" anywhere on the site? If so, the development of this module would be near identical, but will give us many more ways in which to use it.

I have four websites that I am developing this year and I would use this feature on all of them.

Thanks again Mark for taking the time to understand this. It's things like this that make me happy to invest time and money in Stackideas' products!

The "Attend Event" button could be thought of as "Action" and the Admin could select from a set of choices in the back-end, depending on the desired workflow. So for example, some might desire this button: 1) Go to the ES "Event Info" page; 2) Go to the ES "Group Page", 3) Go to the ES "Business Page", 4) Go to the "Promoter's ES page, 5) Go to the ES (if provided), custom, or 3rd party component used for payment processing. Actually I suppose this last one would be implemented as "OnAction" hooks made available through the API for developer customization.

@Mark are events still planned for 1.3 (crossed fingers

Ideally I think there's more value to driving as much engagement as possible in ES such as looking for a venue's events; it offers greater "network effect". I think it's great Jreviews offers MyListings, MyReviews, and MyFavorites Apps because these configurable widgets help to accomplish that.

Thanks for the heads up on this Mark. Yes, Events are set for 1.3 with videos as well

Some good ideas for the button Eileen!

One button would be great, two would be excellent This way you could have both "More Info" and "Attend Event" buttons.

But I don't want to be greedy, so one button will do just fine!

Mark wrote:

Thanks for the heads up on this Mark. Yes, Events are set for 1.3 with videos as well

No, thank you Mark. I hope it makes it into the events functionality in some guise. I'll be happy to test any beta when it arrives.

Thanks Mark

Hi Mark,

As it looks like you guys are working on events, I just thought that I should bump this topic as a little reminder!

Mark

Wow... events are going to be HOT. I am looking forward to 1.3

Hi all,

Events will first work mainly within the component, and the integrations with other components will come later on gradually.

Our priority now is to mainly get this feature done within EasySocial first.

Hi Mark & Team,

Are you guys thinking of adding an option to Switch OFF Events just like Badges, Groups, etc? it's because we will be launching ES to our community soon in about 3-4 weeks and we just worked on adding JEvents/RSVPRo for event registration and we still don't know if ES Events will replace it so having 2 events functionalities in the site will, I think cause confusion. But I am excited on what ES Events would bring, I hope it will be capable of Registration with Payments and without a plus if a Form creator is builtin. But just incase you guys are thinking of adding Registration Payments, please please make a payment gateway for Paypal and Authorize.net

I agree, that Events should mainly focus on itself for now and third party integration should come later. Or an API be made available for 3rd party component developers to develop.

Thanks!

LAC infosys, do you have JEvents and RSVPro integrated in anyway with EasySocial. I'd be interested to see how you have this working.

Jason Rey wrote:

Hi all,

Events will first work mainly within the component, and the integrations with other components will come later on gradually.

Our priority now is to mainly get this feature done within EasySocial first.

Hi Jason, It doesn't have to, this is core Joomla functionality.

All we are talking about is adding a field on the Event creation form to allow the user to select a Joomla article to link it to.

The second part is a simple module, which when put on any Joomla article page, it would detect if an event has been linked to it in the previous step and then show a summary of the event. A content plugin could also fulfil this role. JEvents offers this functionality.

My guess is that you guys will be developing a Joomla module to display "upcoming events" anywhere on the site right? Then you could easily have an event filter setting as to which events it shows "A Specific Event"', "Date Range", Etc. You would just need to add another filter, "Related To This Article". This would allow a single module to provide the functionality of displaying any event, or just those linked to the current article.

As you can see, Jreviews actually plays no part in this whatsoever, so there would be nothing more for you to integrate.

Hi Mark,

Yes I understand what you mean but we will focus on first getting Events to work properly within EasySocial first for now.

Never mind. I guess I'll just have to get this functionality developed or perhaps use something else for events.

Will you be at least developing a module to display events?

Hi,

An EasySocial module is a definite just like module for stream/groups/etc...

Great, thanks Jason, that will help with doing the customisation.

Finally, will the module have filters?

E.g. Date ranges (to allow showing past, future events between date ranges, X number of days etc), events of selected groups, type, etc.

Hello Mark,

We have not actually started working on the modules yet as our priority is to get Events ready so, unfortunately we don't really have an answer to this yet . I really would advise that you guys allow us to complete the Events portion first and only request for additional features (if they are not there in 1.3) because by asking all these questions here now, would only just slow down our development progress because we are just spending too much time on questions that we don't have an answer yet

That is more than reasonable Mark and makes sense

Thanks for understanding Mark!

Looking forward to the release of the events system. I also use jreviews and will eventually look to integrate jreviews listings with easysocial groups and events.

Thanks Greg

I am interested in jreviews integration with events too...

it is possible to create joomla articles events plugin ?

Hello Vladimir,

Currently it is not possible to create Joomla articles in Events.

@Greg JReviews has added "Listings Resources" for JReviews listings. Now, I must admit I have not yet used the new add-on, but it sure looks like it would be a great way for you to enable JReviews users to add ES Groups or ES Events links to listings by either the listing owner or reviewer, depending on how you want to provision the capability.

Following

Vladimir wrote:

it is possible to create joomla articles events plugin ?

A ways down the road I plan on creating a plugin that associates articles with events. In addition to this, display the associated events in that article. This would allow users to easily find events for a particular subject. In my case I would insert it into a tab and use it as a way for people to meet up to a specific location. This allows for information to act as a portal to events.

The bad news is that I'm not very well versed in PHP, so it's going to be a long time before that happens.

Hey guys,

Let me just get this right. What you guys are actually seeking for is just a way for you to list down "related" events in an article? I would like to understand more about this, if you don't mind elaborating more on this in a simple point form?

Hi Mark,

What we are after is:

1) A simple Joomla content plugin and module that will display a single event or many events. The module will have two modes. 'One' mode will let you choose a single event to display and 'Many' mode will have various filters to choose which events to show, e.g. Events by date, location, user or type.

2) On the EasySocial event itself, a way of selecting any Joomla article to link to, ideally showing the article title, intro text and main article image.

If you can do the above Mark, you will have solved the issue for both the Jreviews and regular Joomla users who have posted on this thread. In a nutshell, this is a was of previewing ES events in articles and articles in ES events.

@mark, if there may be an allocation of resource to this task I wanted to suggest that such a capability to associate EasySocial event with an external object has wide application outside of JReviews as well. Could it be abstracted generally enough so that others could leverage this work for similar requirements (i.e. by 3rd party devs such as Techjoomla and/or by ES site admins?).

Maybe a quick conversation with Parth at Techjoomla and/or Alejandro at JReviews, at least to discuss best UX/Workflow design approaches to ensure an awesome, consistent, and robust integration? Using Techjoomla products as examples, here are some use cases:

1) As part of creating the EasySocial object, there is a way of selecting a related:

i) Techjoomla fundraising campaign (i.e. JGive). In this use the user creates a charity fundraiser and later when creating an ES event the user can link the created ES event to their JGive fundraising campaign.)

ii) Techjoomla ticket (i.e. JTicketing). In this use the user creates a ticket for sale and later when creating an ES event the user can link the created ES event to their created JTicketing tickets.)

iii) Techjoomla ecommerce product or service (i.e. Quick2Cart). In this use the user creates a product or service for sale related to or in support of an event and later when creating the ES event the user can link that event to their created product or service.)

2) The module described by @Mark_H would then need to support filtering for those uses.

There's an example provided by GavickPro Event Manager Template which integrates an event theme template with Eventbrite. I'm sure everyone would love to see product integrations that could be as seamless as possible. Anything developed toward this end may help other template providers create custom templates supporting ES for social & events. The example contemplated here brings a complete workflow from creating & displaying the event (ES), the purchase (JTicketing), and the review (JReview). Of course any other extension that wants to could offer their capabilities using the module/plugin as well.

...Don't forget EasyBlog! The same arguments for linking Events to Joomla articles would hold true for EasyBlog posts.... I'm currently trying to seamlessly tie up Events & Blogs because with Events I can't add nice rich HTML / Bootstrap buttons and stuff... but I can in EasyBlog... so just like you might want to associate an ES Event to a Joomla article, there's a case for doing the same with an EasyBlog blog.

How could we forget EasyBlog but of course you're absolutely correct and EB5 with the ease and draw of it's new UI/UX throws kerosene on the fire in your argument as well.

Hi Guys, I think we are in danger of over complicating the issue and scaring Mark off!

If we start with just native Joomla support via a module and support to link articles in events, then others can more easily come up with solutions based on this code. Once we have native Joomla support, Mark and the team can expand on it.

Just my 2 pence!

Hi Mark H - Yes I was a little reluctant to hijack your thread with the mention of EB... but the power of what you're suggesting could be enough for some people to actually drop EasyBlog and go back to Joomla core articles if there wasn't the same power for EB... so just wanted to raise that in terms of keeping everyone happy... and the money still coming in to StackIdeas from EB subscriptions.

...and also, nothing scares the mighty Mark off!

Because JReviews, EasyBlog and Joomla articles both renders / triggers the "content" plugins, I think it's not difficult at all to link between an article / blog post with an Event.

I think I kinda get the idea of displaying the events in an article / blog post. Let's see what we can do for 1.4 Is there any feature requests posted on Voices yet?

By the way, I think we need to take this a step at a time. We have tons of stuffs which we want to add but if everything needs to be added at once, it's going to be impossible to keep up with your requests

Mark,

I agree with you that Shorter Incremental updates is best.

Thanks for the heads up on this Randall