Picture the scene: My very patient and supportive husband and I are setting out for an Arts and Crafts fair, where Rambling Ruminations has a stall.
“Where are we headed?” he asks.
The Problem
I pull up my website on my phone. “That’s the great thing about my website,” I jabber away. “I can see where I’m going.” I immediately pull up the My Events page and then scroll down. And down. And down. Until I get to the right place.
My husband sighs. “Um. It’d be better to have a calendar instead of expecting people to scroll.”
Now I sigh. “If only I knew how.”
The Project
Thus began my next website project: Figuring out how to get a calendar on my website. True confession: I’m a scientist and now an author. At no time have I ever been a web designer!
Internet to the rescue. I googled Elegant Themes by Divi and calendar to find that their canned themes don’t have a calendar module. Ugh. Well then, how can I do it?
Apparently, WordPress has a free plugin. Not that I’m sure what a plugin is, except maybe for something that goes in the wall. Anyway, I downloaded and activated the calendar plugin, holding my breath in case it crashes my website. It doesn’t. It also doesn’t show anywhere.
The Frustration
So I asked the Divi bot, which assured me that the WordPress calendar is “fully compatible with Divi, so [I] shouldn’t encounter any major issues during setup.” I tried some of its suggestions (those that don’t contain weird words like “shortcode” and “blocks”). No joy.
The bot tells me to clear my cache, disable other plugins, and resave my permalinks (whatever those are). Instead of throwing my computer out the window, I sleep on it. Frustration is never helpful.
The next day, I again asked my friend, the bot. He suggested purchasing a Divi Events Calendar Module from their marketplace. I’m kind of hesitant. What are the chances of me being able to use an extension if I can’t even use a plugin? But it’s pretty inexpensive, so I decided to try it.
The Solution
After also asking how to install and activate it and following the directions, I spent the rest of the day populating the calendar. And it’s done! The awesome thing is that my new events page only displays a few events at a time, doesn’t display events that have already occurred, and starts with today. And I doubted I could do it!
What’s the take-home message for my readers? Don’t assume you can’t. Maybe you can.