How to update native calendar events programatically?

What are good Web Based Tools for Building An Announcements/Events Board

• What are good (ideally free) web based tools for building a Calendar and also an Announcements/Events Board? And can these tools produce content that I can embed in a web page? Ideally I'm looking for two features, so it doesn't have to be the same product:1) Ability to post announcements. Ideally like the List feature in SharePoint, where you can post announcements to a list and set a timeframe for it to start appearing and then an end date for it to stop appearing. 2) A calendar. We already have a Google Calendar account, but it can't hurt to see what else is available. Longer expectation, I'm setting up a website for a group whose parent organization is using the Cascade Server CMS. Because it's supporting a massive # of people and units, the features right now are very basic. Fortunately one of the features I do have access to is the ability to build widgets using a Code Block library, like custom site widgets to handle CSS, RSS Feeds, JavaScript, etc. Right now I can use it to build a widget to embed the already in existence Google Calendar for the group. It doesn't look great, but it works. But I'd be curious if there are other free, web based (or modestly priced) online calendaring tools that I can link out to using a Code Block. The second item I'm trying to find a work around for is how to post announcements on the main page without somebody having to manually go in and edit/update the actual text in the widget. Also because people get busy and updating Announcements is done manually, the current website usually has announcements that are out of date. I can't believe I'd ever find myself expressing the wish for anything to be like SharePoint, but what would be ideal would be something like the Lists feature in SharePoint where you can set a start and end date for an Item to be displayed. I've used it before on other projects where I put it on the main page for Announcements. Hopefully this isn't clear as mud. I probably don't have the luxury on this project to spend an extensive amount of time creating custom code for these features, especially in the task of creating an Announcements feature with an expiration date associated with it. But any suggestions (or "This may be the first nice thing I've ever heard anybody say about SharePoint, so you should get your head examined") are welcome.

• Answer:

  So I just googled this for a few minutes, but the announcements feature might be built in for you: http://www.hannonhill.com/kb/1_files/pdf/cascade-faqs.pdf All content can be posted and expired at predetermined times. When creating or editing a page, users may simply edit the metadata fields indicating the start date, expiration date, and which folder (if any) the content should be moved to upon expiration. This is a great way to automate the management of time sensitive information. Coming events, for example, can be automatically removed after the event has passed. Depending on how you want them displayed, the http://www.hannonhill.com/kb/Broadcast-Messaging-System/ also has automated expiry of messages.