Posted by moshe weitzman on November 12, 2006 at 4:35am
Karen's great work on calendar views and date.module make it quite feasible now to use cck+views solutions instead of event.module. The proof is in the live site pudding, but it all sounds promising.
One gotcha is all our existing event_basic nodes out there. Do you guys have a best practice for how to migrate those into CCK date fields so we can easily do Views and calendars?
Comments
Import/Export
I would check out the Import/Export module. I know it will import into CCK, so if you can export from events and pick up the event dates, I think you could import back into cck. In that case, I would set up the CCK dates to be timestamps so the values don't need any conversion.
However, wait just a bit longer to do this. I have been exploring the best way to handle from/to dates for events using CCK dates. There are two ways to do it. One is to have 2 separate date fields in the node and label one 'from' and the other 'to'. That's the only way you can do it now.
The other is to add an option to the field settings to indicate this is a date that has a from/to value so it presents two selectors instead of one, and then stores both values together.
In the process of getting the Views Calendar working I had to figure out which one would work the best, and the answer, hands down, is the second one. That's because Views fields are unrelated to each other so there is no easy way for the calendar to know which of your date fields should be used togther if they're separate fields.
The calendar will work fine either way if your from and to dates are on the same day. The problem is when you have a mulit-day from/to range.
So I need to tweak the Date module to make this possible. It won't be that hard to do, I just need to get it done. Then when you import in you can import your 'from' and 'to' dates to the right fields.
CCK 'field descriptions' for Event content type
Karen,
is this functionality complete?
I'd like to begin using CCK for my Events content on new sites. Does there exist a good or "best practices" set of CCK 'field descriptions' for an Event content-type that I can simply import into CCK?
Thanks!
Status:
From/to dates:
From/to dates are now in the code and working reasonably well.
Repeating dates:
You can manually enter repeating events as multiple date items. At some point I hope we'll be able to use event_repeat as an API to add in automatic methods for repeating dates.
Importing data:
I'm pretty sure the Node Import module will now import data correctly into CCK from a csv file and I posted a very rough beginning of a script to convert event nodes to CCK date nodes at http://drupal.org/node/105551 (needs work and testing. It was done when there was only one date column 'value' and now we have two 'value' and 'value2'). I also started on a module to copy content from events to dates, but it isn't working yet.
Other issues:
Event add-on modules like invite, signup, event_repeat, etc won't work with the date module yet, but I'm not sure they work with Event 5.x either.
Best practices and documentation on how to do all this:
Non-existant :-)