Automatically Promote to Front Page?

This won't exactly solve your problem, though it's pretty much the code you'd need as a basis for implementing this, I think: Check out my automatically demote past events patch. I'd be happy to hack together the feature, but it'll be a little while before I have something working. I think you'll also need at the very least a "buffer time" that lets you say how long before and after the event it's promoted to the front page.

If there's still a need I'm working on a module to do exactly this. I'm moving our user group's web site from WordPress to Drupal (to expand member participation) and we have been using the WordPress EventCalendar plug-in to provide this feature for our monthly meeting posts.

My module (Promoter) works with the Event module to provide automatic promotion of nodes to the front page a selectable number of days before the event's Start date/time and will optionally also set the "sticky" flag. If the sticy option is enabled the event is "unstuck" at its End date/time.

At the moment the number of days in advance to promote and the "sticky" option are gobal module settings shared by all content types. You can enable promotion on any Content Type that also has Events enabled and a checkbox to enable automatic promotion appears below the Start/End date in the node editor. My intent is to make the "days in advance" a per-content type setting as well as the actions to take at promotion time (publish, promote, make sticky, others as appropriate) and also the actions to take at the End date (unstick, demote, unpublish.) They could be made alterable per-node but for our uses that would probably be more confusing that useful.

Its working at the moment but I haven't beaten up on it enough to called it thoroughtly tested but anyone who wants to play is welcome to it. I'll finish fleshing out the rest of the above shortly, as soon as the new web site work settles a bit.

I'd love to take a look at your Promoter module. I assume it's for 4.7? Do you have it on CVS?

I've written and tested it on 5.0 (figured I might as well start the new site with the latest and greatest), not sure if it works on 4.7. Its not on CVS but you can download the version as of today from http://acamug.org/extra/promoter-20070130.tar.gz

This is my first attempt at a Drupal module and I'm not exactly an SQL guru so please let me know if you spot any potential improvements.

Workflow of event nodes should be donbe by other modules such as scheduler.module.

Unfortunately there isn't, or i was not able to find, any workflow module that integrates the event module.
dwgumby, the promoter link is down (a website page is displayed), could you provide a new working one?