Adding an events calendar to a Drupal instance is pretty easy thanks to Kjartan Mannes who authored the Event module and Gerhard Killesreiter who maintains it.

I was asked if I would add a Calendar to the Nonprofit Commons site--dedicated to nonprofits in Second Life--to aid in booking space across the two sims. We often have events, and sometimes they can conflict with one another.

The steps are easy. In this instance, I'm adding the module to a Drupal 5.x install.

Core Drupal is pretty powerful. Out of the box you have blogs, forums, pages, and books. You can highly extend the functionality of the software by adding modules to the mix. There are two ways to acquire modules. The first is to use contributed modules. Contributed modules are developed by members of the Drupal community and the contributed back for others to use. The second way is to develop a module yourself. This tutorial will focus on installing a contributed module in Drupal 5.x.

The first time I ever set up a local install of Drupal was a copy of 4.7.4. I remember aspects of setting things up being a little convoluted. 5.x had not gone into full release--I believe it was in RC 1. So there was no installer and it proved to be an interesting challenge. With the advent of 5.x, things have become much simpler. I'm going to describe how to set up a local install of Drupal 5.x on a Mac--the process is similar on other platforms--and can be used on the beta of 6 if you want to mess around with the newest version of Drupal.

I was asked by a good friend if I could merge the NPSL Offside Links and the Deli.cio.us NPSL links feeds into a single feed on nonprofitcommons.com in a block on the left side of the site. I took care of it this evening, and it is actually a piece of cake to do. These steps work in Drupal 5.x.