Ideas for calendar improvements

[calmmarc]

Hi,

I'm creating an online forum for a university social club which regularly meets up for practical activities & events, lectures, seminars...  So for our community the calendar will be just as important as the discussion boards.

At present I'm thinking about designing a major mod for the calendar, because it has a lot of untapped potential.  I would like to discuss ideas for improvement.

I think the following features are most desirable:

• Recurring events - I mean events that occur on a regular basis.  One problem with this is that you might (or might not) want to have a separate discussion topic for each occurrence of the event.  Perhaps it would be good to display recurring events on the calendar, but only create a discussion topic when somebody clicks on an occurrence of the event and posts a message.
• Categories of events - the calendar could be configured to only display events from certain categories.  If this category system is reasonably sophisticated then the system could be used by a larger organization (like a university) with many interrelated groups (like university clubs).
• Additional calendar views: week view, recent & upcoming events... does anybody have other ideas?
• Integration of a date-picker control on the event composition page.  For an example see: http://www.dynarch.com/demos/jscalendar/

I think the following features are already in Jacks Calendar Mod, please tell me if I've missed anything or misunderstood:

• Allow users to post events without corresponding discussion topics.
• Force all the discussion topics (that correspond to events) to be placed in a single discussion board.
• Allow users to download standard descriptions for each of the events, for import into 3rd party calendar software. (vCal/iCal formats)
• Allow attendees to be associated with an event.

I haven't used Jack's mod yet, can anybody tell me: if you can attach a list of attendees to an event, then will the attendees be notified when the event is edited?  What purpose does the list of attendees serve?

If anyone can think of other important improvements, then please let me know.

All the best,
Marcus


btw - Below is another group calendar, it's layout of multi-day events is much prettier than the current SMF one.  Take a look:
http://www.planscalendar.com/demo/

[calmmarc]

Doesn't anyone have other ideas for the calendar?  Is anybody else interested in this calendar mod?

[Kindred]

I like the recurring event idea...

unfortunately, Jack's Calendar pack is not updated to 1.01 yet...

The flat calendar idea would be nice for those of us who are doing the sidebar menus or portal designs...

[rogerg]

Doesn't anyone have other ideas for the calendar?  Is anybody else interested in this calendar mod?

yes, please.  I really like SMF, but I need a more fully functioning calendar, too.

[circles]

I'm not a developer. Only a user. But I am searching to see if a mod for recurring events has been written. We have lots of recurring events and it is cumbersome to use this calendar. I'm considering linking the forum to some other online calendar so that we can use it more easily.

The other thing I would like to see - linking a calendar item to an existing post. Right now, if a user creates a post about an event and then we decide to put it on the calendar, we have to create a new post. I would like the option of linking to an existing one or creating a new one.