The Western USC Event Calendar

In early 2014, I built out a super cool event calendar for the Western University Students’ Council (USC) by extending the Event Organiser plugin to display public Facebook events hosted by student clubs.

By hooking into the Facebook API, I filled the formerly empty calendar with an always-current list of student-organised events on campus. It was centralized and up-to-date, it worked on all screen sizes, and it asked very little of the clubs themselves — essentially, events they created on their official club Facebook pages were populated in real-time. The end result was, for a time, the most sophisticated event calendar on any Canadian campus.

This API-driven calendar:

• helped student clubs by raising awareness of their events
• informed students in real-time about inclusive campus events
• freed up time for USC administrators by automating event creation