What have you come up with for repeating dates and calendar management as a whole?
We used CCK+DateField+Calendar for a long time, but eventually changed to simply embed a Google Calendar on our site instead.
http://www.gracecommunity.ws/event
The biggest hurdle I think is the general interface for working with the calendar.
GCal: click on the date/time you want to add something and start typing,
Drupal:
- remember where the Add Event link is
- figure out what fields to fill in
- remember to select the date and time (with the correct time zone)
- set some other fields
- click save
- go find the calendar and see if it was added correctly.
And this isn't even going into repeating events (yes, we used the dreaded event repeat module)
Since the rest of the church office and other staff calendars were already using GCal, it made a lot of sense to manage the Church web calendars in the same place.
What I really WANTED to do was import the GCal feed into a Drupal calendar via the Calendar modules' iCal import functionality - BUT the big showstopper was that it was not able to handle the repeating events from the Google Calendar - even though it could create them for an outgoing iCal feed - so close.
So we eventually abandoned Drupal events entirely.
How have you been working with your calendars on your sites? Any techniques you've found to make it easier for users to work with?
Comments
Date 2.0 / Calendar 2.0
Did you try using Date 2.0 and Calendar 2.0? Those two in Drupal 6.x is a vast improvement. Not quite as easy as GCal, but pretty close.
Using FeedAPI, it's pretty easy to syndicate GCal into the Drupal Calendar.
Erik Britt-Webb
drupal@ebrittwebb.com
Still at 5.x
Unfortunately we haven't jumped to 6.x yet - so I only have the 5.x modules available to me.
Does FeedAPI parse repeating events?
Hmmm. once we make the jump to 6.x I may try again and see how it works.
Don't know
To my knowledge, I've never tried parsing repeating events, so I don't know if it works or not. I'll put it on my to do list.
Erik Britt-Webb
drupal@ebrittwebb.com
Parsing repeating imported
Parsing repeating imported events into Calendar is a feature request that has a pretty high priority. I just haven't had time to work on it yet, but it's definitely something I intend to get in.
A buggy solution in JavaScript
I had written a JavaScript library that:
The page that uses it is located at:
http://parapija.bernardinai.lt/kalendorius/
(lithuanian language. Don't forget to enable JavaScript)
Currently it has a bug:
The bug appears because the ICAL parsing library that I used (iCalReader.js by Per-Kristian Nordnes) ignores ICAL RRULE UNTIL parameter.
More code that does not work:
I have tried to replace iCalReader.js with my own JavaScript ICAL parser, but ran out of time. Currently my half-finished ICAL parser is at:
http://code.launchpad.net/~emilis-d/+junk/ctlIcal.js
I will not be able to continue developing it for at least two weeks.
I hope this can help someone :-)
How to Embed entire Google calendar into drupal 6.X ?
I am trying to embed complete google calendar and I havent found any answer. I have tried with gcal_events but
it allows only the events to be listed.So, is there anyway to embed complete google calendar into the drupal 6.x
website ?
I am not that tech savvy and I am new to drupal. I am also not clear enough about the Ical.
Thanks in advance
Ramindya
The Date API has an iCal
The Date API has an iCal parser that works pretty well, so we don't need a parser, we just need to apply the parser to the incoming dates and do something with the results.
Import vs Sync?
Is the iCal support in the Date module one way or 2?
Since we've just moved our staff to Google Apps, I'm considering adding the Gcal->Drupal link. They're not a very tech-savvy group, and I have them using Thunderbird/Sunbird so it's attractive to have them update their calendar on their desktop, it's synced the their Google Calendar, and could be pushed right out to the site.
But if the iCal functionality is import only, I'd be giving up drupal web based input. I don't know why, but something makes me hesitant to do that.
The level of functionality
The level of functionality depends on the version you're using:
Date 5.2 for Drupal 5.x:
- Export by adding an 'iCal' argument to the calendar, which will create an ical icon and a .ics file.
- Import using Calendar settings to identify the url of the .ics file to import
- The 5.2 version is less stable and won't get any new features.
Date 6.2 for Drupal 6.x:
- Export automatically added to default calendar view if you have the Calendar iCal module enabled, creates an ical icon on the calendar that links to a .ics file
- Import using Feed API and the feed element mapper to create nodes automatically from any feed (not only ics but any type of feed supported by Feed API. Once the import data is created and mapped, add the import content type to your calendar and those items will appear.
- The 6.2 version is getting lots of attention from numerous other people that need this kind of functionality.
In both cases, if you import items from other sources into the calendar, the imported items will also show up in the export, so you can aggregate info from several sources into a single calendar.
The 6.2 version iCal import
The 6.2 version iCal import now handles repeat rules to import repeating dates properly into the Calendar module. It uses Feed API, the Feed Element Mapper, Parser iCal, and a date mapper that is being worked on at http://drupal.org/node/215979.