I’m excited to announce that Train-ee is now offering the first “open to the public” traditional classroom training for ExpressionEngine.

Continuing with the events theme, this chapter looks at pulling church event information to the site’s home page.  While I’m there I’ll also replace the Mission Statement area with the latest posts from the Weblog, as I don’t think mission statements are the best use of home page real estate - ever.  New coding approaches covered in this chapter include the use of plugins - which will allow the reuse of content while keeping the site design happy.  I’ll also use a new parameter on the weblog entries tag - the start_one parameter.

Just in case you missed it - due to some very generous sponsors, there are now scholarships available for the Train-ee ExpressionEngine classroom training in September.  You can view the details and entry requirements on ExpressionEngine.com.

One distinct advantage of using native ExpressionEngine functionality for a church event calendar is that the event information can be pushed and pulled to different parts of the site.  In this chapter I’ll show how to display upcoming events on the Ministry detail pages.  New EE functionality this chapter covers will be the reverse related entries tag.

In this chapter I’ll cover the implementation of the Event Details template.  This is the template that will load when a site visitor clicks an event title on the default calendar view, and will display the rest of the information about the event.  New ExpressionEngine functionality covered in this chapter is the display of related entries.  In our case this will mean displaying the name of the ministry group that is sponsoring the event, and linking ministry name to the ministry detail page.