Show events on your website with Portal Plugins

What is a plugin?

With the Portal you can show events from across your deanery, district or diocese in several ways - either as a feed or via search. A plugin is essentially an iframe that you can embed into any website - in other word you can turn any website into a portal for all the activities from all the parishes.

Event feeds

This plugin type lets you highlight certain events on your website. What events you wanna highlight is based on what categories or which location you choose. 'Event feeds' clearly shows your website visitors events within i.e. a selected category, and lets them in one click explore similar events.



Click an event: When the visitor clicks on one of the events, a pop-up will appear where they can read more about the event; where and when it takes place, and the description that's been added for the event. I.e. if you need to sign up to participate.

Click the 'Show more events' button: When the visitor clicks on the 'Show more events' button, the portal pop-up will appear. It will show the user a list of events based on how you set up the plugin. If your plugin shows concerts in London, then the portal will show a list of concerts in London.

Search

This plugin type is a search bar, that we recommend you adding together with an 'event feed' plugin. In case your visitors like what they see in your event feeds but want to look for other categories or want to look further out into the future, they can simply use the 'Portal search' to specifically look for what they want.

Your visitors can enter their preferred location, a data range and choose what event categories they find interesting. When clicking search, the portal will appear in a pop-up, showing a list of events that matches their search criteria.

How to create Portal plugins

To create a beautiful portal page, you should create a couple of portal plugins to show different types of events on your website. You can create two types of portal plugins;  'Portal search' and 'Event feed'.

How to create Event feeds

You'll be able to create your 'Event feed' plugin by navigating to the portal app in ChurchDesk and then going to 'Plugins' within the side menu.

When you've selected 'Event feed' as the plugin type you should look at the 'Build your feed' section. Here you decide which events from the organisations in the portal will appear in the feed.  I.e. show a feed with only concerts or only events for families. 

If you want, you can choose to limit the feed to only show events from within a region, city area or sub locality by entering a location.  I.e. Upcoming concerts in Wembley, London.

Step-by-Step Guide to build an Event feed

Review and get iframe code to implement on your website


Note: This is can be useful if your website has regional or city-specific areas, where you highlight parishes/churches in a sub locality. Now you can create a page for Wembley, that shows parishes/churches and events in Wembley.

When you've entered categories and locations you can simply click  'Create' or if you want, you can customize the plugin further by choosing how the events should be colored – applying the same colours as on your website.

How to create Portal Search

You'll be able to create your 'Portal search' plugin by navigating to the portal app in ChurchDesk and then going to 'Plugins' within the side menu.

When you've selected 'Portal search' as the plugin type all you need to do is click  'Create'. If you want, you can also choose to customize the plugin by setting the font and button color that matches the colours you're already using on your website.

Step-by-Step Guide to create portal search plugin

Updated on: 02/05/2023