As I have been spending more time consulting to Adobe customers on our WEM, Web Experience Management, formerly CQ from Day, I wanted to share some “how-to” knowledge using our Calendar component. Using the Calendar component is simple and provides a large amount of canned functionality requiring only configurations.

One of the canned configurations is a built-in form that is used when creating an event. The built-in form provides a lot of up front data capture, as illustrated, for the event.

Standard CQ Event From

Although you can customize this form for your needs, every event requires basic event information and is the start and end dates and the summary fields. The summary field displays the event name in the calendar.

So lets modify this form.

1. In a content page that contains a parsys, drag a calendar component.
2. Before editing the form, we need to make a copy of the current Edit Event form. Always make a copy of the current event form and place in your application. The form is located in /libs/collab/calendar/content/eventform. Copy the entire eventform and place in your components folder. This is a cq:Page object and does not carry any other JCR objects.
3. After copying the form, you will assign the form to your calendar object.
4. In Edit mode on the page with your calendar, you will see a tool bar atop the Calendar component as illustrated.

5. Select the black “Edit” button and an “Edit Component” dialog appears. Select the “Edit” tab and enter the path to your copied form into the “Event edit form” field. You can alternately use the search button of the Event edit formfield to find your form in CRX.

6. Once the new form is selected, you can save the dialog.
7. Back in the Calendar component, select the blue “Event Edit Form” button and you are presented with your form design consisting of a Form start, Form end and all the form controls, as illustrated.

8. You are now free to modify all the controls, except the Start and End dates and the Summary. These are required to create the event content in CRX and allow the default calendar component to manage the data without any other modifications.
9. Delete or add widgets by dragging from your SideKick
10. When adding your widgets to the form, be sure to set the name property with a JCR node for storage of the field data, i.e. ./my_fieldname
11. Once you have completed modifications to the form, simply close out of the browser window.
12. Go back to your Web site in CQ and select your calendar page. Create an event by clicking on a date and your form should appear.

I hope this helps those that are already using Adobe CQ 5.4 and are looking to take advantage of features outside of the standard functionality. For additional information see the WEM documentation, http://wem.help.adobe.com/enterprise/en_US/10-0/wem.html