calendarize_news for TYPO3

Events in tx_news belong in a calendar, not a chronological list

Most TYPO3 websites use Georg Ringer’s tx_news for everything: news, blog posts, press releases and events. For the first three, a chronological list works. For events, it does not. Visitors expect a calendar with month, week and day views. They want to click on a date and see what is happening that day. calendarize_news builds exactly that bridge: it takes existing news records with date fields and renders them as a calendar.

The extension saves you from switching to a standalone event system. If you already run tx_news, you keep your data structure, your templates and your editorial processes. Instead of a second extension with separate data storage, you get a calendar view on top of the data you already have.

Typical use cases

Event calendars on corporate websites. A training provider publishes 150 seminars a year through tx_news. Each seminar has a start date, an end date and a time. Without calendarize_news, visitors see a long list sorted by date. With calendarize_news, they see a monthly calendar, click on May 15 and find three seminars. For one client, conversion from the calendar view to the detail page was 40% higher than from the list view.

Recurring events without duplicate data. A weekly meetup, a monthly webinar, an annual company party: without recurrence support, the editor has to create 52 records for the weekly meetup alone. calendarize_news supports recurrence rules (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) with exceptions. One record generates 52 calendar entries. If a date is canceled, it is marked as an exception rather than deleted.

Combined news and event pages. Many organizations show a “Latest” section on the home page that mixes news with upcoming events. calendarize_news lets you display the same records chronologically in the news list and by date in the calendar. Two views, one data source, no synchronization effort.

Technical architecture

calendarize_news is an add-on to the calendar extension calendarize by the same author (Tim Lochmüller). It attaches date configurations to news records in the calendarize field: start date, end date, all-day flag, recurrence rule and exceptions. From these configurations, calendarize writes one entry per individual occurrence into its index table when the record is saved.

The calendar is rendered through Fluid templates that output a month grid. Each cell (day) contains that day’s events. The templates are fully customizable. By default, the extension ships templates for month, week and day views. Navigation between months works via AJAX or a classic page request, configurable via TypoScript.

The integration with tx_news runs deep: calendarize_news registers news as an event type with calendarize; the calendar views come from the calendarize plugin, to which calendarize_news adds a field for the news page. Categories, tags and access restrictions from tx_news are carried over. An event assigned to the “Internal” category and meant to be visible only to logged-in users also appears in the calendar only after login.

The iCal export generates .ics files for individual events or the entire calendar. Visitors can import events directly into Outlook, Apple Calendar or Google Calendar. The export uses the iCalendar format (RFC 5545) and takes recurrence rules into account.

Common problems and solutions

The calendar shows no events even though news records exist. The most common cause: the date fields of the news records are empty. tx_news has a datetime field, but the dates live in calendarize configurations that first have to be added to existing news records in the calendarize field. The fix: a migration script that creates one calendarize configuration per news record from datetime, which takes about 30 minutes of development time.

Performance issues with many recurring events. When 50 recurring events each generate 52 occurrences, the calendar index holds 2,600 entries that the month view has to filter. That is noticeable on every uncached page request. The fix: deliver the list and month views cached, as calendarize does out of the box, and limit the time span for which calendarize writes occurrences into the index (setting tillDays). Events more than 12 months in the future do not need to be in the index.

Responsive display of the calendar grid. A 7-column grid for the days of the week works on desktop, but not on smartphones. The default calendarize_news templates are not optimized for mobile. The fix: adapt the Fluid templates and render a list instead of the grid on mobile devices. A single CSS breakpoint at 768px is enough to switch between grid and list.

Migration and version compatibility

calendarize_news depends on tx_news and calendarize. The current version 9.0.0 requires TYPO3 13.4, tx_news 12 or later and calendarize 13 or 14; for TYPO3 v12 there is version 8.0.1.

calendarize (without the _news suffix) by lochmueller is a standalone calendar extension with its own data model, and at the same time the base that calendarize_news builds on: the news dates already live in the calendarize tables. The current version 15 supports TYPO3 13.4 and 14.

For projects moving to TYPO3 v13 that want to keep tx_news, the most pragmatic route is to use calendarize_news version 9 or to build the calendar view as a custom Fluid template directly in tx_news. A custom template takes 2-3 days and leaves you independent of third-party maintenance. Gosign has implemented both approaches and recommends the right one depending on how complex the recurrence rules are.