For many years, Boise State has used The Events Calendar (TEC) as its primary events management platform at boisestate.edu/events/. TEC is a WordPress plugin that has been installed on more than 100 WordPress sites in our boisestate.edu domain to create, market, and manage internal and external events ranging from seminars, lectures, and academic calendars to athletics, fundraisers, and university-wide events.
As our site has grown and demand for TEC has increased, so have the expectations and needs of the web admins who use it and our visitors who engage with it. Through this growth, we have encountered difficulties with TEC when integrating with other calendar systems (such as Athletics and CampusGroups). The plugin has also been found to have significant problems in our environment with repeating events, cross-department imports, and increasingly unsustainable maintenance.
Eventually, it became clear that the university’s business needs were exceeding the abilities of TEC, the impact on website performance and maintenance was increasing, and the growing complexities of inter-connected calendars were causing issues for our site admins and visitors.
We set out to find a better solution for our campus community and Localist stood out as a clear leader.
Some of the benefits of Localist include:
- Reliability. Localist is an external platform which means it is not affected by our website’s codebase. It also doesn’t use our website’s resources, and isn’t vulnerable to code conflicts.
- Dedicated support. TEC is widely used but is not an “enterprise” tool, and thus does not offer enterprise support. With Localist, we have dedicated support resources available to assist us when needed.
- Better compatibility with external calendars. Feeds from CampusGroups, Athletics, and others now work better, accept more feed types, and automatically adjust for time zone variables.
- New capabilities. Localist has an entirely new host of features that allow us to have more control over how it looks, how admins can create events, how events are consolidated and organized between teams, custom feeds, as well as an integration with our campus maps.
In the coming months, we’ll be working diligently to migrate our events from TEC to Localist. We plan to do as much of the work as possible to make the transition as smoothly as possible for our admins, but please do be aware that some orientation will be necessary to learn how to use the new platform to the same degree that you currently use TEC.
Look for more information about this transition soon!