I think what you want to do is very doable. We've done something very similar with a custom leaderboard widget. We used a community-wide setting to hold a JSON encoded leaderboard object that we deserialize using JavaScript and Freemarker. That may be a bit extreme for you, but you could achieve the same results by having four community-wide settings properties:
customer.events
customer.locations
customer.dates
customer.details
Pick better names, then ask Lithium to set them up for you. Once they're in place, you could create a custom widget with this Freemarker code:
<#assign events = resetadmin("/settings/name/customer.events").value?split("|") />
<#assign dates = restadmin("/settings/name/customer.dates").value?split("|") />
<#assign locations = restadmin("/settings/name/customer.locations").value?split("|") />
<#assign details = restadmin("/settings/name/customer.details").value?split("|") />
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Date</th>
<th>Event</th>
<th>Details</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<#list events as event>
<#assign event_board = restadmin("/boards/id/" + event + "?restapi.response_style=view").board />
<#assign event_href = event_board.@view_href />
<#assign event_title = event_board.title />
<#assign latest_message = restadmin("/boards/id" + event + "/messages/latest?restapi.response_style=view") />
<#assign latest_post = latest_message.message.@view_href />
<#assign latest_post_subj = latest_message.message.subject />
<tr>
<td>${dates[event_index]}</td>
<td><a href="${event_href}">${event_title}</a> ${locations[event_index]} <br/>
Latest Post - <a href="${latest_post}">${latest_post_subj}</a></td>
<td><a href="${details[event_index]}" target="_blank">Details >></a></td>
</tr>
</#list>
</tbody>
</table>
You would then populate your settings properties with things like:
customer.events => Americas Events|EU Events|AU Events
customer.locations => in Las Vegas|in London|in Sydney
...
This would need to be done by some off-platform script, but you could also built custom widgets within Lithium that admins could use to set these properties.
