Creating an event

Create the calendar entry

Open Schedule in the sidebar and click + New calendar entry.
The New calendar entry window opens.
Fill it in (fields below).
Click Create event.

The empty state offers the same thing under a different name — a button reading Create an event. It opens the same window.

The fields

Which fields you see depends on your organization’s vertical.

Art galleries get a required Type first — Exhibition / Show, Meeting or Reception — and then an optional Name. Left blank, the entry is named after its type.

A month of desk duty is not a type you pick here. Galleries make it with the Gallery Shifts button beside + New calendar entry on Schedule. It asks for a month and a year, names the entry (Gallery Shifts – October) and opens the Schedule wizard with that month’s dates, opening hours and places already filled in. An entry created as a Gallery Shift before this change keeps its type and still opens and edits as before.

Everyone else gets a required Event name instead, and no Type.

Only the name is required to create an entry. Every other field below can be filled in later.

From there both are the same:

Event date — shown on the public calendar. Not required to create the entry, but required before you can publish it.
End date — optional, for a multi-day event
Start time and End time — both optional
Location (address) — included in calendar invites so people can navigate there
Description — a plain-text box. Markdown and HTML are stripped; what you type is what appears, line breaks included.
Status — Draft, Published or Closed
Go-live date — optional. A draft entry publishes itself on this date.
Go-live time — optional, with a go-live date. The time of day, in your gallery’s timezone, the draft goes live; blank means midnight. Members see it from that moment, and its status changes to published within a few minutes.

Three checkboxes:

Show on the public website calendar — off means staffing only. The entry stays on your internal and member calendars but never appears on What’s On, the public calendar feed, or the site assistant.
No shifts required — see below.
Show AI engagement signals to members and calendar managers — per-shift badges (Going fast, Help needed, Popular) plus a short AI-written line that refreshes as people sign up. Members see them in the member portal under Calendar; calendar managers see them on the entry’s page. They are never shown on the public sign-up page.

Publishing is the Status field. There is no Publish button. Set Status to Published and save.

An entry with no date cannot be published: “Give this event a date before publishing it — an undated event cannot appear on the public calendar.”

Add shifts

On the entry’s page, the Schedule card carries + Add shift, alongside Schedule wizard and Bulk import for doing many at once.

The Schedule wizard has seven steps, in this order: First date, Last date, Pick dates, Times, Splits, Slots, Review — committed with Create shifts. It has no roles step, no pattern step and no Preview step, and it sets no labels.

A shift has six fields:

Shift number — optional
Date — required
Start time and End time — leave blank for informational rows
Capacity — blank means unlimited
Label — free text, e.g. DELIVER, Starbucks Team Event

and one checkbox, Open for sign-ups, which you uncheck for informational rows.

Unchecking it on a shift people have already joined hides them. A closed shift has no Roster button, so you cannot see, manage or remove its sign-ups until you tick the box again. Use it on rows nobody signs up to — see Bulk-managing shifts for the full behavior.

There is no Role field and no Notes field on a shift. Label is the only free-text field a shift has, and it is meant for marking informational rows rather than for describing a job. If you need “Server” and “Setup” as separate jobs, make them separate shifts.

The link appears on the entry’s page under Public sign-up link:, as plain text with a Copy button next to it. There is no “view page” link to click through.

The link is on your organization’s own web address once that address is verified (Settings → Organization → Domain says your site is live there), even though you work in the admin screens on the cartoncrew.online address. Without a custom domain, or while it is still waiting to be verified, the link uses your <your-name>.cartoncrew.online address. The View other shifts button in the email volunteers get when you cancel their shift follows the same rule.

It only appears once the entry is Published and has a token. Until then you get: “Set status to Published (or a go-live date in Edit) to get a public sign-up link.”

For galleries, shifts are members-only and there is no public link at all: “Members sign up for these shifts in the member portal. There is no public link.”

On the public sign-up page, a shift that has already ended shows This shift has ended with no box to tick, and a sign-up for it is refused. “Ended” is judged by your organization’s own time zone (from Settings), so a shift later today can still be taken until its end time.

Entries that need no staffing

Tick No shifts required for a meeting or anything nobody signs up for. The shift builder disappears and the entry offers nothing for members or the public to sign up to. A Change button switches the rota back on.

You cannot tick it while shifts still exist. The server refuses with “This entry still has N shifts. Delete or move them before marking it as needing no shifts.”, and the reverse is refused too — adding a shift to a no-shifts entry gives “This entry is marked as needing no shifts. Clear “No shifts required” on the entry before adding shifts to it.”

Repeating an entry

Galleries creating a Meeting get a Repeats fieldset: Weekly, Every N weeks, Monthly, on the same date, or Monthly, on the same weekday, ending after a number of entries or on a date. (A month of gallery shifts comes from the Gallery Shifts button instead, and does not repeat.)

Repeats is only available while creating. It does not appear when editing an existing entry. An existing series is changed from the entry’s own page, with Repeat… and Change all future.

Every entry in a series is a real calendar entry. On its page:

Edit this one / Delete this one change only that occurrence.
Change all future changes this entry and every later one; entries you edited on their own are skipped and listed unless you say otherwise.
Cancel from here removes this entry and every later one that nobody has signed up for. A later entry that already has sign-ups is kept and listed.

When it does not work

The public link 404s — the entry is still Draft. Set Status to Published.
A shift will not accept a sign-up — it is at capacity. The message is “This shift is at capacity.”
A gallery member cannot sign up publicly — by design. Gallery shifts are members-only and refuse public sign-ups outright.

Last updated: 2026-09-23 · Applies to: CartonCrew v1.621+