Much better than nothing, in my opinion. Go for it!

Hi Gordon,

Thanks for the ideas. I would love us to find the solution which addresses 80% of needs with 20% of work - the main reason we have not been able to schedule this work is because our design so far requires so much work that taking this in means not doing 5 or more other things.

I would love to hear from others if the option just to replicate a bunch of copies of current event would be helpful - without any connections between those events, no mass editing or deletion. Just straight creation of multiple copies.

Welcome to the issue that won't die. I have the dubious distinction of having the first public post on this issue from May '08. On Dec 30 '09 you published a detailed description of a possible be-all-end-all solution to solve all aspects of the problem. It was clearly complicated and would involve a lot of work but would have been great to have. It appears that the size of the project has pushed it to the back burner and we, the users of the system are left without a solution.
In my experience, 80% of a perfect solution can be solved for 20% of the cost and the remaining 20% of the solution costs 80% of the budget. I, for one, would be quite happy with a solution that handles the repetitive, simple stuff and leaves the the difficult issues for another release.
Much of the problem could be solved with a change to the "copy existing event" logic. When we select the event we want to copy you would pop up a 12 month calendar. We could click on each day we want a version of this event to be created. You then replicate the event to every day we selected. Done, that's it.
This would allow us to create any number of copies of an event on any bizarre schedule we want. It's a little more work for us than "Every 2nd Friday" but it accommodates every possible scheduling option and is dramatically easier than the current solution.
But it does not support mass editing of existing events. This could be partially handled with the additional criteria that says that when an event is being created, if there is already an event with the same Title on that date, you would change the Event Details section of the existing event so that the Visible switch, Enable Registration switch, Tags, Location, Description, Show attendees, Include Pending Registrations and Start Time match those of the new event. The registration data remains untouched.
While this solution fails to address many of the details of your Dec '09 description, it would provide a dramatic improvement over the current environment and goes a long way to satisfying the general requirements of Recurring Events.
I'd be interested to hear how other users of the system would evaluate the usefulness of this solution.

Dimitri

I appreciate your honesty about your ability to add this feature.

I know it's hard to serve the diverse needs of all your users, but we've been hanging on since early 2010 for this feature (as well as the ability to control who receives automated event email blasts).

We may consider a hybrid solution, keeping WA for member management and going with evite or something similar for event management - or we may switch to another membership management service if they support the features that are important to us.

Mike, we do consider this feature quite important - but it is also pretty hard to do well, without confusing the heck out of everyone (especially editing aspects of single event/series). I do not expect us to be able to tackle at least until H2 2012.

You guys are driving us away be delaying this feature and the "Simplified Event Registration" feature (RSVP Yes/No/Maybe). UGGGGHHHH!!!!

Can an event be configured as recurring yet?

As a new WA user, I've put together a great looking website but this issue is the most time consuming aspect of daily use. Our club has 1 weekly meeting, two monthly meetings, 6 quarterly meetings and 4 annual meetings. That gives me a total of 104 meetings that I have to input manually. All of the weekly and monthly meetings are held at recurring location, days of week and time of day.

Now I also have several other meetings/events I need to input throughout the month to support our district and international level training and/or conventions. It takes about 2 minutes per input giving me about 300 minutes to input all these recurring meetings just to get the initial entries, let alone changes to speakers, locations, etc that always come up in our club. Considering the first post on this issue was made in 2009, you really should priortize this effort into your next update

Fred

Sorry, not the next release...

We are a church which means we have to rely on volunteers to post their small group information. Not having recurring events is killing us. We have to talk our group leaders through the tedious process of posting an event and then tell them they have to do it again for every single week. It makes no sense not to have recurring events available. Most other calendar programs have comprehensive recurrence schedules (3rd Tuesday, etc). This would be a real help fur us. I hope it's in the next list of updates.

We would use this feature all the time.

Some of our events are weekly (e.g, same event, every Wednesday) and some are bi-monthly (e.g same event, every other Wednesday), all year round.

For each event, we need to be able to enter multiple dates.

I would definitely use this feature (easily setting up recurring events) and the solution proposed seems logical and well thought out.

There is one additional element that I'd like to see added to this workflow, which is to allow the ability for certain recurring event reminders to be sent out to only select groups of members or contacts.

For example, our association holds monthly membership meeting/luncheons, so sending to all subscribed active members works great. But we also hold monthly board meetings. Rather than sending out the board meeting announcements/reminders to all members, it would be great to be able to (as part of the recurring event setup) select just the small group (Board Members or Board Officers or whatever other subgroups there might be) rather than overwhelming our membership with unnecessary and irrelevant communiqués.

Thank you for your consideration of this additional feature.

Our events are forcing us to look at alternate platforms. We may eventually go to Wordpress, but for now will probably use Google Calendar to at least have a calendar feature. I am also disappointed at WA's priorities.

Jan:

I agree with you and Wim. WA's event features are a weak area that are forcing my group to evaluate alternatives. Recurring events and the ability to decline an event invitation are the 2 biggest issues for us.

I can't blame WA if the majority of their users don't care about event features. WA has some good features, but it seems like they are having trouble keeping up with user needs (at least this user's needs).

Mike

I agree with Wim, recurring events is a basic basic basic calendar function. It did not even occur to me that you would not support it. We don't even bother to use your calendar features because it's too much trouble. What a waste! It would be a great feature to add to allow our members to view all the events they sign up for–we offer an annual program. Hope you reconsider this feature for 2011.

Dmitry,

I have read all the comments. I know this is probably not an easy task. But looking at how long your customers have been asking to get this done, it should get included in one of this years updates.

Before our club made the move to WA, we were using a free online calendar that had the ability to do recurring events. It took me about 30 seconds to add an event occurring on every Sunday for the whole year.

The way I have to add these events on WA's calendar takes me forever.

Wim

Ben, given all other stuff in the works right now, unfortunately I do not think we will get to this one in 2011, sorry.

Hey,

The layout that was described for the recurring events sounds great. I am just wondering how high this is for implementation. Is it going to come out this year?

My organization would find great value in this.

Jan, I appreciate your feedback. As you can see in this forum we have over 400 various requests we are trying to balance out and while recurring events is an important one, it's not as common as many others - so we are not likely to get to it within 2011, sorry.

I would really appreciate if you could email me at support@wildapricot.com and elaborate what you mean re lack of interface editing and website customization.

The next update is planned for May - but the scope of what's there was finalized long time ago. Actually we are almost done with development so from now until then it will be all about testing.

See http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Release+history

As a first time user, I am quite frankly shocked that this feature is not available. This is an events management site after all! I was too far into our project implementation to go another route or I would not have chosen wildapricots. There are now years of testimonials and no one need to explain to you how a calendar works–we all have them. Please proceed with this most important feature.

I will not recommend WA or use it for other membership clients until this is complete. The lack of interface editing and website design customization along with this feature would have resulted in a different direction for our project. When is the next update due? Thanks for your work.