Added to official ideas list at http://drupal.org/node/237995
There are a ton of date/calendar improvements that I'd like to see. The problem is that I don't have time right now to stop and create a specific proposal. I'm hoping that we have others (students or not) who have some specific ideas on date/calendar projects that would make sense.
You can read through (huge!) feature request lists at http://drupal.org/project/date and http://drupal.org/project/calendar for ideas, or you can look at http://drupal.org/project/upcoming.org, a previous SoC project that never got finished and no longer works, but which would still be nice.
In particular, anything that would help link events together across Drupal sites and with other calendar appliations are often requested. Lots of work has been done on creating a good ical parser to handle imported feeds, but lots more could be done about improving export capabilities. And it would be great to add ical alarm features that would trigger email reminders, or ways to make it easier to add new events.
Lots and lots of ways to make these things work better. Wish I had time to flesh this out more, but hopefully others will jump in and help out.
I'd be delighted to mentor any efforts in this direction!
Comments
Cross-posted to Events group
Hopefully we can come up with some killer SoC proposals around this area.
I was hoping some student
I was hoping some student who is interested in this area would respond and push it in whatever direction they' like, since there's lots of ways this could go. Since no one has responded, can it still make it to the official ideas list if I flesh out the proposal myself?
Absolutely!
If you have time, that'd be awesome. We need to finalize our ideas list on Sunday, though.
For something like this and locations, I'm comfortable leaving it somewhat open too, to let students flex their creativity. But since a lot of SoCers are new contributors to the project, they often can appreciate at least a rough direction on where to go.
For the ideas list we're not asking for anything too extensive... just a couple of paragraphs. In the past we've gone whole-hog in speccing out things and it tends to either lead to copy/pasted applications or else a total lack of students applying since all the "fun" part of figuring out solutions to problems has been done already.
jquery date + time selector
jquery date + time selector improvement would be very welcome for starters as well as linkage between the "from" and "to" times so that the users only has to change relevant fields (hours and minutes in many cases) and not redo the entire widget (day, month, year) each time.
Some of that is already in
Some of that is already in the 5.2 version -- if you leave the 'to' field blank it will automatically pick up the 'from' value, so if you set the default for the 'to' field to all blank fields and you only want the hour to change, you only have to select the hour.
However there are lots of nice jquery things that would be nice to add in to have the 'to' field dynamically change as you change the 'from' field and do things like be sure the 'to' field is greater than the 'from' field, etc. etc.
@karesns: i was aware about
@karesns: i was aware about the auto population of the to field which was appreciated, i was only commenting on its lack of usability and intuitiveness for an unknowing "normal" user. A little UI reworking and a JS link between the two could add some ease of use.
Example operation: The from and to fields are auto populated with the same value (as determined by the user blank, 'now', relative) when the "from" field is changed, IF and only IF the "to" fields value for that field granularity matches the original value (e.g. Day of month) then update the "to" with the new value that is being selected in the "from". We can also reinforce the inability to select invalid FROM and TO times that begin in the wrong order.
It could definitely be
It could definitely be improved, and it would be great to get some JS help, so I'm not disagreeing with your suggestion, I just wasn't sure you knew I had tried to make some improvements in that area, but you are.
OK, here's an open-ended SOC
OK, here's an open-ended SOC proposal:
The combination of the Date and Calendar modules is being used in lots of places to get date handling while leveraging the power of CCK and Views, but there are still lots of ways to improve on them. Some suggestions for SOC proposals would be things like, but not limited to, the following:
1) Improve on the iCal export -- for instance, add in a way to include additional information by creating ways to map additional fields to the ical export, add RRULEs for repeating dates to the export, and/or add in VALARMS.
2) Improve on the iCal import -- for instance, read in RRULES and use them to create repeating dates in a calendar, read in location and alarm info and do something relevant with it in Drupal.
3) Use jQuery and AHAH to add usability improvements throughout the code, like testing that 'To dates' are greater than 'From dates', auto-filling 'To dates' when the 'From dates' are filled out, making it easy to jump around the calendar and add new events, and looking for other places to make the UI easier and more intuitive.
4) Create new calendar views in addition to the year, month, week, and day, like a nicer looking agenda view for the day that breaks items out by hour and minute or a schedule view that plots events into columns by time period or room (like the schedule you would create for a seminar).
Review feature requests in http://drupal.org/project/date and http://drupal.org/project/calendar for other ideas.
This sounds very interesting
Hello everyone,
I'm a student and still looking for a good project to do for GSoC. I think it would be cool if I could pick this one. I'll dive on this tonight and write a first proposal for it, based on the things KarenS provided, and probably some of my own ideas.
Rolf van de Krol