Beacon Events – Events Calendar with Recurring Events & Google Calendar Sync

Description

Beacon Events is an events calendar that does the basics properly and doesn’t charge you for them.

• Recurring events are free. Daily, weekly, monthly (“second Tuesday”, “last Friday”), yearly — with an end date or a count, and dates you can skip.
• Import from Google Calendar or any ICS feed, and stay in sync. Feeds are checked hourly. Every sync is logged — created, updated, removed — so nothing drifts silently. Events that disappear from a feed are set to draft, never deleted behind your back.
• Views that look like your site. List and month views as blocks or shortcodes. Our stylesheet does layout only — colours and fonts come from your theme, and every element has a class you can target.
• No bloat. Styles load only on pages that show events. No add-on store, no upsell screens, no nag notices.
• Venues with addresses. Each venue has a street address, shown on the event with a map link — no API key, no embedded map slowing the page down.
• Export. Every event has “Add to calendar (.ics)” and “Add to Google Calendar” links, and your whole calendar has a subscribable feed.
• Uninstalls clean. Turn on “delete all data on uninstall” and the plugin removes everything it created — events, venues, categories, settings, its table.

External services

Beacon Events does not phone home, track anything, or load scripts from third parties. Two things touch the outside world, both under your control:

• Calendar feeds you add. If you enter an ICS URL under Events → Settings (for example your Google Calendar’s public iCal address), the plugin fetches that URL from your server once an hour to keep events in sync. Nothing is fetched unless you add a feed.
• Plain links. The “Map” and “Add to Google Calendar” links on an event are ordinary hyperlinks to google.com/maps and calendar.google.com. They open in the visitor’s browser; the plugin sends nothing itself. Google’s terms: https://policies.google.com/terms

Data the plugin stores

One database table, {prefix}beacon_occurrences, holding the expanded dates of each event. It is removed on uninstall only if you turn on “delete all data on uninstall” under Events → Settings.

Shortcode

[beacon_events view="list" days="60" limit="20" category="workshops"] — `category` takes one slug or several, comma-separated (`category="workshops,talks"` shows events in either).
[beacon_events view="month"]

Block

Add the Events block and choose list or month in the sidebar.

Tickets and RSVP

Free covers the calendar. If you need people to sign up or pay — RSVP with capacity, Stripe tickets, attendee export, visitor-submitted events — there is a paid add-on, Beacon Events Pro. Nothing in the free plugin is time-limited, crippled or nagged.