Building calendars and upcoming events in Drupal has evolved significantly since the days of 4.6 and 4.7 and the storied Events module. You may be surprised - even caught off guard - to know it has changed significantly for the better only very recently.

The new 7.x-3.4 version of the module just released on May 19 now makes use of views templates. In previous versions after enabling the Calendar module a visit to your Views listing page would show several views installed by the Calendar module. It was immensely satisfying at first to see the new view with its various displays for day, week, month, etc. Until you discovered that your events would were not showing up on their actual dates but on the date in which they were created. Site builders would then go through the painstaking process of custom configuring a contextual filter (argument) for your event date rather than the default 'created date' used by the module upon install.

Thanks to module developer KarenS this problem is a thing of the past. Once you get over the shock and dismay of not finding the familiar default calendar view in your listing you will notice the new 'add from template' link at the top of the page. Click it, select your date preference and you are in the home stretch.

This is one of the best usability improvements for one of the most common tasks in Drupal. And despite several good online resources guiding site builders through the custom contextual filter configuration, the old way was still confusing and time consuming.

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