What is Cobranding?
Cobranding gives your users the ability to create and maintain calendars on your site. localendar's cobranding programs allow you to offer our services, integrated seamlessly into your site with your own logo and color scheme. This is a powerful method for ISPs, schools, clubs, newspapers, and organizations to enhance their offerings and increase traffic.
Cobranding is also a great way to organize calendars if you need to create and manage a bunch of localendar accounts. First, you create one "master" account and enable Basic cobranding (see instructions below). Then, you create all your other accounts as "sub" calendars underneath this master account. The advantage comes when purchasing one of our Premium subscriptions. If you had created separate localendar accounts for each calendar without using Cobranding, then each account would need its own subscription. But with Cobranding, if the "master" account purchases a Cobrander subscription, then all sub-accounts automatically get the benefits of their own individual Webmaster-level subscription (learn more about our subscriptions on this page)
Basic Cobranding (Free)
Basic Cobranding allows you to offer a completely customized calendar on your site. We provide you with a simple URL (i.e. https://localendar.com/cobrand/mycompany) for your users to access their calendars.
With Basic Cobranding, you can customize the color scheme of our pages (e.g. background colors, menu colors, etc) to match your own site. You can customize the default calendar color scheme used by all new members, and you can even optionally supply your own logo to appear at the top of every page. Your users can still customize their calendar color preferences as they wish, but every new member start out with the default colors that you choose. There is no minimum user requirement or charge for using Basic Cobranding. You can activate this feature from the Cobranding sign-up page.
If you are using cobranding as an individual who wants to manage multiple calendars, it's important that you create all of your calendars using your Cobrander url (i.e. https://localendar.com/cobrand/mymasteraccount). If you create new accounts from the localendar.com homepage, they will not be linked to your Cobranding account, and will therefore not receive the benefit of any Premium subscription purchased for your Cobrander master account.
Advanced Cobranding
When one size doesn't fit all, Advanced Cobranding allows you to integrate localendar's services into your site more seamlessly than possible with Basic Cobranding. localendar makes this tighter integration possible by allowing you to customize several additional aspects of our services, providing a facade for your users to transparently move between their calendar and the rest of your site.
With Advanced Cobranding, you can:
- Specify your own logo and color scheme (page colors and default calendar colors)
- Reposition our menu bar and navigational calendar
- Add your own text, buttons, links, or other customized content to every page
- Design your own "gateway" pages to handle common operations like logging in, signing up for a new calendar, or requesting a lost password
- Handle your own errors (e.g. what happens when somone tries to login with the wrong password ?)
- Dignup large batches of members asyncronously via a nightly XML feed
- Let your users sign on to your site once (and not again to access their calendar)
Advanced Cobranding gives you complete control over the look and feel of how localendar will serve your site. If any problems are encountered while processing one of your users' requests, with advanced cobranding you can specify a URL where the user should be redirected, read a response code from our server, and then dynamically handle the error however you choose.
With Advanced Cobranding, we provide you with access to our public cobranding API so that you can build and host your own customized "gateway" pages, for the cleanest integration with your site's look and feel. We support CGI, ASP, JSP, etc. If a user has already logged in and been authenticated at your site, Advanced Cobranding gives you the option of allowing them to access their calendar without having to sign in again (also known as Single Sign-On).
Advanced cobranding requires a minimum of 5,000 existing members on your site. To put Advanced Cobranding to work on your site, send an email to cobranding@localendar.com
Can I create a custom logon page for my users?
localendar will generate a standard login page for Cobranded accounts. Experienced webmasters who want to use their own login page instead of the one provided are free to do so. View the page source for the localendar screen and make sure to duplicate the HTML <form> action and fields that are provided.
Do I have to have a logon page at all?
If you're an experienced web developer, then you can circumvent our login page by just POSTing the data directly to our form's action method via PHP or a script. We are unable to offer development help or support for this activity, however
Do I need "Cobranding" to publish my calendar?
No; Cobranding is not required to publish a calendar. Cobranding is strictly for giving your site's visitors the ability to create their own personal calendar.
Customizing what Users See
Refer to this documentation for information on customizing your Cobranding account.