A community calendar for WordPress, with an approval queue.
Calendar² Pro puts an event form on your WordPress site. Visitors send in their events, each one waits in a queue, and nothing appears on the calendar until an editor approves it. The form, the queue, the emails and the spam checks are all included, from $79 a year.
Local news sites, venues, community groups and visitor guides: places where the people running events are the best source of them. A community calendar lets them send events in themselves, so your editors check and publish instead of retyping press releases.
The calendar itself is Calendar², which is free: month, list and day views, venues, organisers and repeating events. The public form and the queue are the part that’s in Pro.
Put it on any page with the “Event submission form” block or the [calendar2_submit] shortcode. It uses your theme’s fonts, colours and buttons, and checks each field as the visitor goes, with the same checks repeated on the server.
The event
- Title and description (plain text, up to 5,000 characters). Both required.
- Start date (required, and not in the past), start time, end date and end time, or “All day”. An event can last up to 31 days.
- Repeats: weekly on chosen days, every two weeks, or monthly on the same date or the same weekday (“the third Saturday”). It ends after 2 to 52 times, or on a date within a year.
- Cost as free text (“Free”, “$15–$55”) and an event website.
- Venue: chosen from your published venues, or a new one with its name and address.
- Category, from your top-level categories, or your default if they don’t pick one.
- An image (optional).
The person sending it
- Name and email, both required, and a phone number if they want to give one. None of these are published.
- A consent checkbox, with your own wording if you set it, and a link to your privacy policy page when you have one.
Developers can relabel fields, make optional ones required and add fields of their own through a filter. Added fields are saved with the event and shown to editors in the Submission box.
A submission arrives
It’s saved as a pending event and listed under Events → Submitted, with a count on the Calendar² menu for the people who review. The editors you choose get an email with a link to it.
An editor checks it
The event opens in the normal editor, with a Submission box beside it: who sent it, their email and phone, when, and any likely duplicates already on the calendar. Fix the title, swap the venue or add a category as you would on any event.
Approve
Approve from the list (one at a time or in bulk), from the box, or just press Publish. However it’s published, a new venue sent with the event is published too, and the submitter gets a “your event is live” email.
Or reject
Give a reason if you like (it goes in the email to the submitter) and the event moves to the Trash, or is deleted outright if you prefer. Its image is deleted either way, and so is a new venue sent with it if nothing else uses it.
Who can approve
Approving needs permission to edit the event and to publish it, so administrators and editors can by default. Authors can’t approve other people’s submissions. Pro also adds an Event Moderator role: it can manage every event and venue and upload images, and has no access to posts, pages or settings. Give it to volunteers who review events and nothing else.
The emails
- To your editors: a new event to review. It goes to the addresses you list, or the site’s admin email.
- To the submitter: we’ve received your event.
- To the submitter: your event is live.
- To the submitter: your event wasn’t published, with your reason if you gave one.
Each one can be switched off, and the thank-you message on the form only promises the emails you’ve left on. They’re sent with WordPress’s own mail function, so an SMTP plugin you already use applies. If emails fail to send, administrators see a notice saying so.
Community calendars get the same event from the organiser, the venue and a keen reader. The Submission box lists up to five events already on the calendar that look like the same one, either a similar title within a day of it, or the same venue at the same start time. It compares against published, scheduled, draft and pending events.
It points them out rather than blocking them, because only a person can tell a duplicate from two events with similar names. Venues are matched too: a “new” venue whose name matches one you’ve published uses that one instead.
- A hidden field that people never see and bots fill in. Those submissions look successful and are thrown away.
- A signed form token: a form sent faster than a person could fill it in (4 seconds by default) or more than a day after it was loaded is refused. The page fetches a fresh token, so forms on cached pages keep working.
- The same form can’t send the same person’s event twice.
- A limit per visitor: 5 events an hour by default, counted on a one-way hash of their address. If your site is behind Cloudflare or another proxy, a setting tells Calendar² which header holds the visitor’s real address.
- A limit per email address: once someone has 10 events waiting, more are refused until you review them.
- Optional Cloudflare Turnstile or Google reCAPTCHA v3. If you choose one and a key is missing, the form stays closed rather than open without it.
- Descriptions are plain text, and square brackets are stored encoded so a submitter can’t run shortcodes.
The limits, the minimum time and the anti-spam check are settings under Calendar² → Settings → Submissions.
- JPEG, PNG, WebP or AVIF. The type is read from the file itself, not its name.
- At least 400 pixels wide, and up to 5 MB by default (you can raise it to 20 MB, within your server’s upload limit).
- Very large images are refused before they’re opened: at most 12,000 pixels on a side and 25 megapixels in all.
- Location and camera details are removed where your server’s image editor can re-save the format.
- It becomes the event’s featured image. If the event is rejected, the image is deleted.
iPhone photos in HEIC format aren’t accepted: the visitor sees a message listing the formats that are.
- The submitter’s name, email and phone are stored with the event and never shown on the site.
- Their IP address isn’t stored, only a salted one-way hash of it for the rate limit.
- WordPress’s Export and Erase Personal Data tools include submissions, along with any extra fields your form asks for. Erasing removes the details from the event and its revisions.
- Calendar² suggests wording for your privacy policy under Settings → Privacy.
- Export and erasure live in the free plugin, so they keep working if you remove Pro.
- Install Calendar² (free) and Calendar² Pro, and activate your licence under Calendar² → License.
- Under Calendar² → Settings → Submissions, tick “Accept events from visitors”, choose who gets the emails, and pick the form page.
- Add the “Event submission form” block to that page, or the shortcode below.
[calendar2_submit]
On The Events Calendar, community submissions are part of the Pro plan, $399 a year, which also includes repeating events and event importing (Liquid Web’s plan page, checked 25 October 2026). Calendar² Pro is $79 a year for one site, and repeating events are already in the free plugin.
Moving a calendar across? The switching guide takes over your existing events in place, with a roll-back. For a side-by-side of the two plugins, see Calendar² vs The Events Calendar. Pro also imports Google Calendar and other iCal feeds.
Everything a calendar needs is in the free plugin, with no limits and no account. Pro is for sites that take events from the public or pull them in from elsewhere.
Download Calendar² freePublic event submissions
A form visitors use to send in events, with an approval queue so nothing goes live until you say so.
Calendar feeds
Import events from iCal and RSS feeds, other Calendar² sites and sites running The Events Calendar, and keep them in sync.
Updates and email support
For as long as the licence runs. If it ends, Pro keeps working; nothing is switched off.
$79
One website. What most buyers need.
$149
A handful of sites, or a small agency.
$299
Every site you build or run.
Already bought? Sign in to your licences to download Pro, manage sites and billing.
- Calendar² Pro’s source code (main, 25 October 2026) and Calendar² 1.1.0, for every feature and default on this page.
- The Events Calendar plans: Liquid Web, checked 25 October 2026. Pro lists “community submissions” and “Event importing (200 imports/day)”.
Running a busy community calendar?
Tell us how many events you take in and how you review them, and a person replies, usually within two UK working days.