Improvements to the calendar

[irc]

What improvements do you want to see in the calendar?

It feels like they put together a relatively limited calendar to get it in v2.0 with the intention of upgrading it in future releases (this is not meant to be a complaint, it's a good start!http://www.improvisation.ws/mb/images/smilies/tongue.gif). So let's collect all of our suggestions on improving the calendar here.

Here are a few suggestions to kick off the discussion:
Multiple calendars
Different views for the calendar: daily and weekly
Ability to create reoccuring and/or multiple day events**** Very important
Time field for events
A flag that the admin can set for a user to give them the ability to create public events (in addition to giving them access through user groups.
Ability to group events similarly to how birthdays can be grouped. For instance on my calendar, people will be announcing shows. It would be nice to group these shows by theater or city.

[Freddie Bingham]

The calendar was not cobbled together to just get something into v2.0.

I wrote this calendar as a hack for v1.1.x and it got put in just as my hack was written with a few modifications and bug fixes.

[irc]

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that. I like the calendar very much. I'd just like to see it improved. :)

[leadZERO]

What he meant to say was....

"The calendar in v2 is awsome, thank you freddie for the time you spent on it. It's an awsome base and gives us hackers out here a goot starting point. How about everyone else now give their ideas because some of us out here are working on calendar hacks and need input."


Myself included...

My additions:

* Group based calendars. Users can have permission to add group events.
* Admin can select what usergroups get their own calendar.

[JonnyQuest]

Weekly view would be fantastic for us. I'd love to pack the calendar full of events, but on a monthly view, it would be way too jammed.

[bira]

from my point, the three additions I'd most like are:

1) annual events (eg: celebrity birthdays, holidays such as xmas, etc. The thought of having to enter these every year...)

2) time field. (so that users can use the calendar as their private online manager)

3) e-mail reminder (so that a user can request to be reminded about an event - public or private).

But I am so utterly in love with the Calendar as it is, that I must stress the above options are added bonus afaic.

Cheers,

Bira

[irc]

Originally posted by bira
3) e-mail reminder (so that a user can request to be reminded about an event - public or private).

Great idea! Could be like subscribing to an event.

[irc]

Oops. I just noticed that there is a daily view for the calendar. My mistake. I'm wondering if there could be a feature to set that as the default when going to the calendar.

Actually, that should be a pretty easy hack. I'll work on that myself. :)

[dwh]

Yeah, reminders. Like, allowing an email to be sent along with a link to buy flower's for X's birthday.

[Skeptical]

Email reminders will most likely not make it because freddie has said in the past he will NOT have anything to do with crontabs, which would be necessary for such a feature. It's a shame though... Such a powerful feature already built into Linux, and yet, won't be utilized... I don't know why.

[Freddie Bingham]

When I have time I will get some of that stuff in and write the crontab scripts using /usr/bin/php (or lynx-source) and php scripts only! I'll give you something to send out birthday emails shortly.

[Freddie Bingham]

Ok here is a script that will send out emails to whoever has a birthday on that day and has selected to receieve email from the admin.

Now it is not my job to tell you how to figure out how to make this a cronjob but if you have php standalone use it, otherwise use lynx.

Change the extension to .php

[Shaman]

You can also use "curl", or "wget" or "snarf".

Go to http://www.freshmeat.net/ if you need to find them.

[Freddie Bingham]

Well yes but l didn't want to cover the whole spectrum, tends to confuse more than it helps.

[Sharg]

So all I need to do is have our friend CRON read this file each night and it will work ?

[Freddie Bingham]

You need to have your friend CRON execute this file each night through something that parses PHP, that being lynx, local php, and the options Shaman listed. Didn't I list this in the text of the script though?

[Dream]

Originally posted by irc
Ability to create reoccuring and/or multiple day events**** Very important

i think this one is the most important, so we could place yearly public events in the calendar such as christmas and so on :)

[MaSTaKiLLaH]

Whats about a Warplaner ? So that my clanmembers can set their status for the trainings and maybe leave some comments. Is it possible to limit the calendar to a single usergroup, or to have an extra calendar for a special usergroup ?

[irc]

You can give a group the ability to edit calendar events, so this is already available in a way. It might be cool to automatically link a calendar event with a thread sort of like how a poll is associated with a specific thread.

[MaSTaKiLLaH]

Is it possible to have two calendars, or to limit events to a usergroup, so that the other users can't see the clan events ?

[tubedogg]

Not currently.

[DroppedAtBirth]

The only thing on my wish list for VBulletin is the Calendar to support multiday events.
:D :D :D

[TechTalk]

Whe I try to use lynx i get:
Your terminal lacks the ability to clear the screen or position the cursor. (sent to me from crontab)

And I cant seem to find php anywhere! here is my phpinfo:
http://www.glidetech.com/phpinfo.php

Can anyone help?

Thanks

[bira]

TechTalk,

You have PHP run as a module (like me) and not as cgi so you don't have a standalone executable, so to speak. Check out this thread (http://vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5964) .


I don;t know if you're talking about the same thing, but I set a crontab job for a command to run once an hour:

10 * * * * /usr/bin/lynx -dump http://www.atlasf1.com/somescript.php >/dev/null 2>&1

And it wouldn't work. I had the same error as you.

So I did some researching and discovered it's a lynx bug. To overcome it, put the following line at the top of your crontab:

TERM=vt100

Works like magic :)

[thewitt]

I've found wget to be much more clean than lynx for running PHP scripts from cron.

Just a data point.

[TechTalk]

Thanks bira. Where might the cron files be stored? Ive been doing this stuff thru webmin too lonmg and now im spoiled :(

~Chris


Originally posted by bira
TechTalk,

You have PHP run as a module (like me) and not as cgi so you don't have a standalone executable, so to speak. Check out this thread (http://vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5964) .


I don;t know if you're talking about the same thing, but I set a crontab job for a command to run once an hour:

10 * * * * /usr/bin/lynx -dump http://www.atlasf1.com/somescript.php >/dev/null 2>&1

And it wouldn't work. I had the same error as you.

So I did some researching and discovered it's a lynx bug. To overcome it, put the following line at the top of your crontab:

TERM=vt100

Works like magic :)

[TechTalk]

Well i figured it out :) Thanks for all your help bira......

[Jamie]

not sure if this has been said before,

but i would like to see a feature where you can select that only birthdays appear in the calendar for users that have made a post in X number of days, because the calender is mostly cluttered up with dead users or users that have yet to make a post.

[Myriad]

I would like the calendar to to limit events to user groups or users. For an example, students should not see faculty events because of its sensitive nature. Would it be possible to associate events with groups?

[WebAddict]

To review some of the things that I would like to see, some of which have already mentioned.
[list=1]
Multiple Calendar support for unlimited calendars
Multi-Day events
Support for birthday-only calendars
Option for time
Todays events posted on main forum index
Option to pop-up events in a small seperate window
Option for an Admin/Moderator calendar, for only those designated to view it.
[/list=1]

Freddie, you might remember that I have been asking for these options for a while now, since you first wrote the orignal calendar script... I know all of us are very appreciative for what you HAVE done, and I again extend our gratefulness. We only ask for these things because we don't know how to do them ourselves. Ever since I purchased vB, I have been taking a php course to learn how to program. I have written a few scripts, and have worked with the database, but I still have a hard time understanding vB. Because of my lake of understanding, and experience with the vB backend, I fail to write anything that would work for vB.

Thank you so much for the great work that you put into vB and you patient support to us for our impatient ideas to make vB a better product. I hope that everyone understands the time and effort required to program something... Just imagine all of the additional time it has taken vB to get where it is today. 2.0 was expected to come out months ago. But because of its additional features, and being a new rewrite, it has taken forever. Because of this, some of us get a little impatient. I'll admit, I get that way to. But at the same time, I remind myself what a great product we have and the gratitude that you haven't rushed it t othe shelf to make the deadline, like some other software (cough cough microsoft).

Freddie, you are awesome, keep it up...