Countryside 2010, a government-supported initiative to promote outdoor activities in the southeast of England, showcases hundreds of events taking place in the countryside from 29th May to 13th June. Commissioned by Rural Ways to implement the site, Dominic Sawyer of Hastings-based Dot Tourism selected ExpressionEngine as the site’s publishing system and tapped Engaging.net to deploy it.

Since the purpose of the site is to help visitors find events, the Search Events functionality needed to be quite comprehensive — more comprehensive than ExpressionEngine’s native search functionality allows. Visitors must be able to search events not only by criteria and keyword but also by county and date — and since some events have non-contiguous date ranges, this was yet another complication to overcome. But we did.

Also, events are added not by the site administrator but by the individual organizers of the events themselves, so the site needed a specially-designed events publish/edit screen. As of this writing over 250 organizations have published almost 500 events on the site, making it a fabulous resource for locals and visitors alike this spring.