Wednesday, Apr. 22, 2009

New online wine calendar

By Andy Perdue, Wine Press Northwest

We have launched a new wine events calendar on winepressnw.com.

We'd like your help testing it out.

Our old system consisted of wineries, wine shops and organizations submitting their items on a form, then us adding them to a page in chronological order. When an event passed, we had to manually remove it. It was an arduous system that wasn't exactly friendly to us or to you.

The new system allows event organizers to fill out a form to submit their item, then we go in and approve it.

More importantly, it provides wine lovers more options for finding the events they want to attend. The new events calendar includes a function that allows users to narrow their search by event name, city and/or state/province. Or you can look at all events by leaving the search fields blank.

We think this is a big improvement over what we previously offered, and it certainly will streamline the process on our end. We'd ask you to test-drive it to see if there are any bugs in the system that we've overlooked.

Click here to go to the new wine calendar.

One item we're still trying to get to work is mapping. It's a feature we hope to add in the near future.

Any feedback you want to leave in comments or by emailing me at editor@winepressnw.com would be much appreciated.