Calendar Solution: Handling upcoming Dates with Posts?

I’m not sure I’m allowed to ask a question like this on this forum, however I’ll try. My question is not yet about a technical problem but how my complete theme-architecture might be build to fit my purpose.

My site is mainly about upcoming events – e.g. like lectures and workshops.

I’d like to list all upcoming lectures and workshops on my frontpage with a little description (might be the_excerpt). When clicking on a date (e.g. workshop) I want to see the complete description of the event.

I have absolutely no idea if it’s even possible to do this kind of thing with “posts” – upcoming dates?

If it’s possible I thought of handling “workshops” and “lectures” as categories so I’m also possible to sort by category or display an entire page with only all lectures or all workshops.

Moreover I’d like to be able to do another thing – reviews of an event.

So imagine a date (lecture or workshop) is over I still want to display the event in an “archive” or something where I can add a review with photos and a description of the event to the date itself.

How could I handle this thing with wordpress – I’m usually pretty good when it comes to programm this theme, I just don’t know how to create this architecture with wordpress in the first place!

Thank you in advance.

edit: If it’s not possible with wordpress alone do you guys know a plugin that handles stuff like that?

Update:

add_action("admin_init", "admin_init");

function admin_init(){
    add_meta_box("date_of_event-meta", "Date of Event", "date_of_event", "events", "side", "low");
}

function date_of_event() {
    global $post;
    $custom = get_post_custom($post->ID);
    $date_of_event = $custom["date_of_event"][0];
    ?>
    <label>Date of Event:</label>
    <input name="date_of_event" value="<?php echo $date_of_event; ?>" />
    <?php
}