Frequently asked questions

Owl is a comprehensive events and calendar plugin for Craft CMS 5: recurring events, ICS feeds, multisite, GraphQL and front-end submission — plus native Craft Commerce ticketing in the Pro edition.

Any Craft site with a calendar: venues and concerts, community event listings, workshops and classes, conferences, markets — anything that needs recurring events and, optionally, tickets.

Entries don’t recur, don’t expand into per-date occurrences, don’t emit ICS feeds, and have nowhere to attach per-occurrence ticket inventory. Owl is purpose-built for time: recurrence, occurrences, timezones and ticketing are first-class.

Owl Lite is free forever. Owl Pro is a one-time $149 (with an optional ~$74/yr to keep receiving updates) and adds Commerce ticketing and related features.

Lite includes recurrence, ICS feeds, GraphQL, multisite, calendar views and front-end submission. Pro adds Commerce ticketing (ticket types, per-occurrence capacity, oversell guards, order snapshots), registration/RSVP, dashboard widgets and CSV/ICS import.

Yes. Install Lite now and upgrade to Pro at any time from the Plugin Store without losing any data.

Yes — Showtime bundles Owl Pro with Stub (booking & appointments) and Headcount (memberships & subscriptions) for a one-time $249, versus $327 buying the three separately. It is a single license, a single control panel section and shared Stripe credentials, so membership plans can discount or gate access to your events and bookings. If you already run Owl standalone, Showtime works in place with no data migration.

Owl is distributed under the standard Craft plugin license. Lite is free of charge; Pro is a paid edition.

Full RFC 5545 recurrence rules — daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, with intervals and counts — plus exception dates (EXDATE) and single-occurrence overrides.

Instead of expanding recurrence rules at query time, Owl writes each occurrence to an indexed table. That makes calendar range queries and pagination fast, plain SQL, and gives ticketing a real row to attach to.

To a rolling horizon (about two years by default, configurable), kept topped up by a scheduled task so far-future dates keep appearing over time.

Yes. Recurrence is expanded in the event’s IANA timezone and stored in UTC, so events keep their local wall-clock time across spring-forward and fall-back. This is explicitly tested against real DST dates.

Use the fluent craft.owl.events() Twig API, query over GraphQL, feed FullCalendar from the JSON endpoint, or expose a subscribable ICS feed. See the Front-end & Twig docs.

Yes — Owl includes front-end submission with validation, an optional honeypot and per-IP rate limiting. Submissions can start disabled for moderation.

Yes. Subscribable per-calendar feeds and single-event downloads are part of the free Lite edition.

Only for the Pro edition’s ticketing. Commerce is an optional, runtime-detected dependency — without it, Owl runs as a full calendar and hides ticketing.

Tickets are Commerce purchasables tied to a specific occurrence, with per-occurrence capacity and oversell guards. An order snapshot freezes the event title, date and ticket type so completed orders stay correct even if the event changes later.

Yes. Owl’s Twig API mirrors Solspace’s parameters, so most templates are a find-and-replace. The features Solspace charges $199 for are free in Owl Lite. See the migration guide.

Yes, and it’s hardened for it: dates and recurrence live on a shared table while title, body and slug are per-site, avoiding the propagation and Matrix bugs that affect other plugins.

Craft CMS 5.6 or later and PHP 8.2 or later, with MySQL or PostgreSQL. The Pro edition’s ticketing additionally needs Craft Commerce 5.0+.

Open an issue on the GitHub repository — the link is in the navigation and footer.