We’ve used a lot of plugins over the years – no, really, an awful lot. Very rarely do we stumble across one that’s so good we add it to the list of go-to plugins. The vast majority of plugins either do too little, or try to do way too much and, more often than not, end up doing the one thing you want them to do really poorly. But The Events Calendar is one that’s made it into our good books.
We used it on a client site earlier this year and it’s doing a fantastic job.
What is it?
The Events Calendar is a plugin for listing and managing events, plain and simple. It’s been around for a while, has a decent following in terms of installs, and is well maintained (which is a rare thing in itself). We’ve only used the free version as it did everything we needed it to. But the paid version looks great too.
You can find the plugin here and learn more here.
What we liked
- The install was straightforward, no awkward setup wizards or additional accounts needed.
- It was intuitive to configure, the pages/views it adds made sense.
- It’s lightweight with minimal dependencies, it sticks to what it aims to do and doesn’t try to be too smart.
- It just used simple shortcodes for embedding calendars
While writing this article we realised just how low the bar is in 2026, and for what makes a good plugin. Bloat is rife on the internet, in fact it’s rife almost everywhere these days. So when we find something that meets a simple need with a simple solution, we’re usually impressed.
How we used it
We installed it on a client’s site; JW Associates’ site to be precise. Click here to take a peek, and here to see the implementation.
The requirement was simple enough, the solution needed to handle a mix of one off workshops and recurring sessions with limited availability and a payment system. To say it wasn’t easy to find a suitable plugin is an understatement, we filtered through so much rubbish before we landed on The Events Calendar. We even tried implementing something else before it became clear – halfway through the implementation – that it wasn’t going to be suitable!
The Events Calendar slotted into the existing site nicely, adapted to the theme well and generally just worked perfectly the first time around (we should have bought a lottery ticket).
Restrictions to be aware of
We really should stress that the free tier is basic; it’s not flashy, you don’t get all the bells and whistles. If you want a full events management suite you’re going to have to fork out for a subscription. Not that that’s a bad thing as, from what we’ve seen of the free version, we’re fairly confident that the subscription is probably worth it if your use case requires those features.
We don’t often write about plugins and we want to say that we weren’t sponsored or incentivised to write this article, we were just really impressed with The Events Calendar and thought they deserved a shout-out.