Quickstart: from login to a published event
This is your on-ramp. It takes you from "I just got a Pavillion account" to "I have a published calendar with one real event on it that I can share with a friend."
A quick ten to fifteen minutes of reading and clicking will walk you through everything you need to get started. The rest of the guide is reference material you can come back to.
What you'll have when you're done
When you finish this tutorial you'll have a working calendar at a public URL, with one event on it. You'll be able to share that link with a friend in a chat or an email for them to see.
Before you start
You need an account on a Pavillion instance — one community's installation of Pavillion. Your local arts council might run one, your chamber of commerce might run another, and your account lives on whichever you signed up for. This is your calendar's home. How this impacts using the guide here is small — URLs will show your-instance.example as a placeholder; just substitute the domain you actually signed up at in its place.
Sign-up itself varies by instance: some accept open applications through the site, others run on invitation only — the community running it decides which posture fits. By the time you're reading this, you've got your account and are ready to start building.
Step 1: Log in
Go to https://your-instance.example/ and sign in with the email address and password you set up. Because you don't have a calendar yet, Pavillion drops you straight into the new-calendar form — the first-run shortcut for the most obvious next step. (If you already had a calendar, you'd land on its page; if you had several, you'd land on a list of them.)
Step 2: Create your calendar
The form asks for two things:
- Calendar title — the human-readable name. "Westside Community Garden Events," "Riverbend Folk Series," "Maplewood Mutual Aid Calendar." Whatever your community will recognize.
- URL handle — the short, URL-safe name that becomes part of your calendar's web address. Pavillion auto-fills this based on the title, and you can edit it before submitting. The full handle for your calendar takes the form
your-calendar-handle@your-instance.example— the@shape matters because that's how other Pavillion calendars (on this instance or any other) will find and follow your calendar.
A note on choosing a handle.
The handle is hard to change after the fact — once people have linked to it, bookmarked it, or pasted it into an email, changes break those links. Pick something short, durable, and tied to the community rather than to a moment in time. riverbend-folk ages better than riverbend-2026-season.
Submit the form. You'll land on your new calendar's events management page. It's empty. We'll fix that.
Step 3: Round out your calendar's identity
The two things you just entered are the bare minimum to create the calendar. Before publishing an event, fill in the rest of the basics:
- From your calendar's page, open Manage Calendar.
- Add a description. One or two sentences: who this calendar is for and what kinds of events it lists. Visitors to your public page will read this. So will other calendar owners deciding whether to follow your calendar.
- The primary language is set to your account's language by default. If you only plan to publish in one language — leave it as is. If you'll publish in more than one, add the additional languages here too. The title and description fields then grow a small row of language tabs above them — one tab per language you've added — and clicking a tab swaps the field below to that language's text. You edit one language at a time.
Settings save as you go: text fields save when you click out of them, dropdowns save when you pick a new value, the default event image saves as soon as upload finishes. There's no separate "save" button for the basics. Move on when you're satisfied.
A note on calendar description.
Treat the description as something a stranger reads before deciding to follow your calendar. "Events organized by and for the Westside community garden — workdays, harvests, potlucks, and quarterly meetings" tells a visitor whether they're in the right place. "All events" tells them nothing.
Step 4: Add your first event
Back on your calendar's page, look for the button to add an event (it lives near the events list). The event editor opens as a full-page form. We'll go top to bottom.
Event details. Give the event a title. Add a description — a short paragraph is fine, more if there's logistics worth spelling out. If accessibility info is relevant (wheelchair access, ASL interpretation, scent-free space), there's a dedicated field for it; visitors look for that information specifically and it shouldn't be buried in the description.
Location. Click Add location. The location picker opens. You probably don't have any places saved yet, so choose Create new place, fill in the name and address, and confirm. The place is now reusable — for the next event you create at the same venue you will be able pick it from a list rather than re-typing the address.
A note on places.
A "place" in Pavillion is its own thing — separate from the events that reference it. The address is stored once, on the place. Events point at the place. So when the venue changes its name or you correct a typo in the address, you fix it once and every event there is updated.
External link (optional). If the event has a registration page, ticket link, or external info page elsewhere, paste the URL here and pick the prompt that matches it ("More info," "Tickets," "RSVP"). Skip this if there's nothing external to link to.
Event image (optional). Upload one if you have it. If you don't, skip — the calendar's default event image will fill in.
Categories. Pick at least one. If your calendar is brand new, no categories exist yet — you'll need to create one. From the category section, add a category like "Community gathering" or "Music" or whatever fits. You can add more later.
A note on categories
Categories are how visitors filter your public page (Show only Sports events) and how your events get matched up when other calendars repost them. A small, durable vocabulary works better than a long list of one-off labels — "Concert" can help visitors find many events; "Tuesday night jazz quartet" won't.
Series. Skip for this first event. A series is for grouping multiple distinct events under one named program (a summer concert series, a fall lecture series). One-off events don't need it.
Date & time. Set the start and end. For this first event, pick a date within the next week or two so it shows up immediately on the public page you're about to share — you can always add further-out events afterwards. Leave it as a single occurrence for now — no recurrence rules. If your event repeats on a schedule, recurrence handles that, but it's easier to learn the editor on a one-off first.
When the form is filled in, click Save Changes in the page header. The event is now published — Pavillion doesn't have a draft state. If you change your mind, you can edit, cancel, or delete it from the events list.
Step 5: See what visitors see
Your event is live. Now look at your public page.
Open a new browser tab and go to https://your-instance.example/view/your-handle, replacing your-handle with the URL handle you chose in Step 2. (You can also find this URL on the calendar page — there's a link under the calendar's title.)
What you're looking at is what anyone on the internet sees. No login required. Your event should be there, with the place, the date, the description, and the category you chose. Click into the event to see its detail page — that's the URL you'd share for a single event.
If you don't see it, the most likely reason is the date filter. The public page opens to a default window — two weeks out by default — and an event further in the future is still there, just hidden until a visitor widens the range. The date control near the top of the page lets you (and visitors) jump forward. You can also change the calendar's default window from Manage Calendar if two weeks isn't right for your community's rhythm.
Paste your calendar's URL into a chat with a friend. Have them open it. Ask whether the event makes sense to them as someone who's never seen it before. That feedback — from a fresh pair of eyes who is the audience, not the organizer — is more useful than any checklist.
What next
You have a calendar. You have one event on it. You have a URL you can share. The rest of the calendar-owner guides cover what comes after:
- More events. Add the rest of what's coming up. Events that repeat (weekly meetings, monthly meetups) — see the recurring-events guide. Series of distinct events under a program name — see the series guide.
- More structure. A bigger event list benefits from a richer set of categories and a tidied-up list of places — those have their own guides.
- More people. If you're not running this alone, invite editors so others can publish too — the editors guide covers that.
- More reach. Find other calendars in your community to connect to, and decide which of their events to publish onto yours — the follow-and-repost guide covers that. If you're migrating from an existing calendar (Google Calendar, Nextcloud, a WordPress plugin, an existing Gancio or Mobilizon calendar), the ICS-import guide shows how to bring that history in.