Twist & Twirl Consulting is an official Constant Contact Technology Partner

CCJ Events is a Joomla component that displays a list of EventSpot events from a Constant Contact account, with links through which users can view details, register, etc.

Manage your events in your Constant Contact account as usual, and this component will show them on your own website.

There are options to choose how many events to display, filter the events shown based on their title, and how to display events of different status.

Please click the link above to download.

Supports Joomla 3.2.2+

How To Use It

1. Installation

After you download the component, you will install it the same way as any other Joomla component.

2. Connecting

After installation, when you visit the component backend administration page, it will look like this:




Click on the button to connect to your Constant Contact account (you will only need to do this when you first install the component).

This will redirect to a page that asks for your Constant Contact login information.   Enter it and press the "Login" button to continue.  If you get a message from Constant Contact about enabling cookies in your browser, make sure you've enabled all cookies including third-party cookies (the Constant Contact login authorization cookies are considered third-party in this situation because they're coming from a different source than your own site).

Then Constant Contact will ask you to confirm that you want to allow "Twist & Twirl Consulting CCJ Events" to access your Constant Contact data (it can take several seconds to display this question, depending on the load on the CC servers).   Click "Allow" (yes, you want to allow the component access to your data or you wouldn't be installing it).

3. Configuration

After connecting, you'll see the component administration page:




Disconnecting: if you ever need to switch to a new Constant Contact account, you can disconnect using this button, and then reconnect using another account as described above.

Number of events to show: If you wish to limit your display to, say, the 10 next events, you can set that here.  Note that the component will always display this number of earliest (soonest) events.  If you leave it at 0 (zero), it will display all the events available in your Constant Contact account subject to the other filtering uptions below (there is currently a limit of 50 events; we expect to lift that limit in a future release).

String to match in event title: if you enter something here, the component will only display events containing this string in their title.  For example, if you often hold both classes and seminars, you can use "Seminar" (assuming your events use that term in their titles) to display only the seminars. 

Format of dates: This is for displaying dates in a format appropriate to your international region.  The default is "Long MDY", which is appropriate for the United States, and looks something like "February 27th, 2015".  "MDY" would be "Feb 27, 2015", "DMY" would be "27 Feb 2015", and "YMD" would be "2015 Feb 27".

For each type of event (ACTIVE, COMPLETE, CANCELLED, DRAFT, DELETED):

• Show events: whether events of this type are displayed at all
• Show dates: whether to display the date of each event of this type
• Show times: whether to display the time of each event of this type
• Link on titles: whether the title of the event will be a link to the details/registration page for events of this type
• Text for: each event of this type is displayed in a table with columns for its title, the date & time (if they are turned on by the above options), and this short text phrase (e.g. "Register!", "Cancelled", etc)
• Link on text: whether the text phrase will be a link to the details/registration page for events of this type

Cache time: the data obtained from your Constant Contact account will be cached for this number of minutes before re-contacting Constant Contact.  This prevents you from flooding the Constant Contact API with requests every time someone displays a page on your site.  Constant Contact limits us in the number of API calls we can make per day, so you are required to have caching turned on; the minimum is 5 minutes.   This means that if you create a new event or make some other change, it won't show up on your website for this period of time.  If you need to see something faster, you can use the "Flush Cache" button, and the latest data will be pulled from Constant Contact the next time the component is displayed on the frontend.   Please do not ask us "I made a change in my account, why didn't it show up" - this is the reason, and you can just use "Flush Cache" if you don't want to wait for the cache to expire.

Credits: whether or not to display the "Powered by CCJ Events" credit at the bottom of the frontend component page.

Display at top of frontend page:  here you can set up some content to be displayed at the top of the frontend component page (your event logo, a description of what you're displaying with this component, or whatever you want).

Display at bottom of frontend page: similar to the previous item, but displayed at the bottom of the page (your own credit, for example).

4. Making it show up

After you have the component set up, time to make it display on the frontend of your site. As with other Joomla components, you do this with a menu item. So create a new menu item in the appropriate menu for your site, and then for the "Menu Item Type" hit the "Select" button, open up the "CCJ Events" tab in the list of menu item types, and choose "CCJ Events". Then after you set the other parameters for the menu item as you wish and hit "Save and Close", when you refresh the frontend of your site and choose the new menu item, you'll see the CCJ Events component display your list of campaigns.