The page:
http://webempoweredchurch.com/support/classes/usingcalendarbase/

is confusing (at least I am confused)

It says:
Begin by clicking on the "Create new record" icon and selecting Calendar from the list.

It should give a clue where the icon is. Further, is it even necessary, given that a couple of Calendar Records are already defined? In addition, calling it a "Calendar Record" is confusing, since everything on that page is a "record".

Finally, I'm not at all sure our secretary is going to cope with the interface for entering events.

Lyle,
I struggled and struggled with the calendar and finally gave up.
I finally "solved" the problem this way. Our secretary uses a calendar program to make a calendar that is posted on the bulletin board. I had her save this file as a pdf and then uploaded the pdf file. It works very well I think. It is not interactive and when an item needs changing it requires a new file be uploaded. This has not been a problem so far. You can look my solution by going to http://stocktonumc.org/stay_informed/calendar_of_events/

I would welcome your comments.
in His service,
Don

Calendar Base is well-organised and effective but requires quite a bit of initial effort on the part of the person setting it up for others to use. The first thing that strikes me is that it demands a way of thinking that is not intuitive (but becomes so after repeated use).

How complicated you make it depends entirely on yourself and how you perceive the needs of your church.
For my part, I make do with one Calendar record (which is virtual equivalent of the thing that hangs on the wall). Thus I only have one record in the list entitled Calendar. However, preparatory to encouraging someone else to take over the entry of data, it seemed a good idea to populate the calendar with example data from our own congregation.

The Hall Convener of our congregation, who had no previous experience of Typo3, quickly learned how to create recurrent events, recurrent event exceptions and so on. By the time he was finished, he was very adept at doing it.

One of the advantages of going through the tedium of creating records (and there is a certain satisfaction in seeing the Calendar build up) is that you can then include a list of items on some pages and you can control how many to show and so forth.

Whilst you do not need to create organisers or locations, it is a good policy to create these before you start creating your event records. Thus, if you know that an event is organised by Mary Brown and that it will be held in the Large Hall, you should create an organiser record for Mary Brown and a location record for Large Hall. Now, when you come to create the Event record, under the location tab, you can pick Large Hall from the drop-down menu and similarly pick Mary Brown as the Organiser.

If you create the Event record before creating the relevant Location and Organiser, you need to save the Event record and then create the Location and Organiser records and then you have to import them under the the tabs I mentioned earlier. As this slows you down and involves more clicking, it is best to create all Organisers and Locations first.

Of course, it seems as if the Locations were designed to be used in cases where congregations had premises which were away from the main location and you can provide google mapping for these. However, we just used the Locations to indicate which part of our premises were being used.

Similarly, the Organisers field seems to be intended to enable links to pages with short biopics of the individuals who are in charge of an event or, probably, more specifically, a recurrent event. It seems that it could also be used to allow an organiser to alter the details or descriptions of an event.

Minimally, it is a good system, which can be expanded to your heart's content.

I would encourage you to persist with it as it becomes a very useful tool especially if you have several meetings which happen, let's say, on the first and third Tuesdays, or the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month and yet others which only happen once a month.

Like Typo3 itself, it seems a story of no pain, no gain - but once you have mastered the basic aspects of it, you have mastered the most powerful opensource cms and calendar extension on the planet.

With best wishes,
Calum

I just set up Calendar Base for my church. Since it support external calendars, I created a Google Calendar (our email and everything runs through Google Apps, so we have Calendars supplied, also) and have it synchronizing with the website calendar.
This way, people can update the Google Calendar from the web or via their Outlook or iCal, with changes and events automatically posted on the website. Way awesome!