Please use the new site for any comments – thanks

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Photo year calendar example

Use your ical calendars (google or other (others by importing into google)) and your own photo’s to generate a A4 year calendar.  Print to PDF and send to your local print shop for bindin.  Viola! instant personal presents.

Test it out on the demo site.
See how the examples work, then add your own ics url to the query.

The month view styling

Restyle embedded google calendars

I have developed a script for personal use, however added additional coding in the hope that others may use it as well.   The idea for this year calendar was prompted by a post by lindenlan back in 2006.

The css could also be used to simply restyle your google calendar.

Firefox only, although IE also possible if you adjust the IE stylesheet yourself

Note that this has only been tested on firefox on vista and styling may depend on your default font sizes etc and may require tweaking.  I made minimum changes to the main style sheet get what i wanted happening and did not change the IE sheet.

Inputs:

I may develop an html form later, but for now it is url query string driven, so maybe start a text file with your parameters:

src=some google calendar name

Under the calendar settings when you click on the html tag, you get a url – we need the piece that says something like :src=0bajvp6gevochc6mtodvqcg9o0%40group.calendar.google.com.

These could be private calendars – such as your families birthday’s and special anniversaries, or public ones such as,

• public holidays,
• eccentric days,
• moon phases,
• Earth seasons,
• United nations events,

google calendar colours

If you have multiple calendars,use src[0]=xxxxx, src[1]=xxxx etc

Coloured calendars

For multi-calendars, colours are a good idea.  We are limited to those that google allows – else we just get the default blue.  Use the embed helper to see the colour options (need to login to google).

• red and one color only for first calendar:  color=#CC3333
• pink:  color[0] = #DD4477
• purple:  color[1] = #994499
• etc

Months & start date

• Specify the number of months to return &months=n
• Specify the start month &start=YYYMMDD

Images

Images can be switched on or off:

• imagesfile=none
• or imagesfile=someurl.txt, where the text file contains as many images+1 as months you would like
  • imagesfile=file:///C:/temp/test.txt for your local file or
  • imagesfile=http://webdesign.anmari.com/calendar/image_file.txt for a file on a server.
• The image file is a text file that looks like this

2009zebra.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1004/580865496_d15b16308d_o.jpg

file:///C:/temp/test.jpg
etc

Styles or Stylesheets

My default is aimed at a monthly print view, developed for firefox for my font-size etc.  The times are switched off – they appear just as a note on that day.
I struggled to find some halfway decent other interesting examples of calendar restyling – you could look at using their ideas to create your own stylesheet.

• http://wildweek.com/calendar.html
• http://www.fighting69.com/schedule.html
• http://fatfish.info/images/mygooglecal/newcal.html
• http://www.ipolynesia.com/kahuku/calendar-main.htm

Demos or Examples

Multi calendars overlayed

kahaku style

Test it Out:

• Restyled google calendars with images -The default demo option – 2 months, 3 images only (1 cover, plus 2 months):
• non google css for google calendars. Default calendars, No images, just- Use imagesfile=none
• Google calendar with an alternate start date Starting at January 2010 -Use ?imagesfile=none&start=20100101
• multiple different google calendars – this example uses the Swedish name days and the best primary school’s online calendar ?src[0]=xxxx&src[1]=xxxx
• a different style sheet with thanks to kahuku, ?style=http://….css

Resources:

• The adjusted main stylesheet: am-cal-css.css
• Unadjusted IE style: mygooglecal3ie.css
• sample image_file.txt
• a 2009 cover image

You can also get more information by trolling through linden lan’s posts and comments.  Note that google changes it’s method now and then, so be wary about using any old advice:

• http://www.lindenlan.net/2008/01/10/calendar-casting-call/
• http://www.lindenlan.net/2007/06/18/restyle-google-calendar-gadget/
• http://www.lindenlan.net/2007/10/14/restyle-google-calendar-2/
• http://www.lindenlan.net/2006/10/08/restyle-google-calendar/

If you enjoy messing around with ical files, you could also have a look at ical-events-list, which is about styling a better agenda or list based table of upcoming events.

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Your Ical file may have a timezone specified, the event may be in a another timezone.  Your host server in yet another timezone, (and your testing server in another), and your user or web viewer in yet another……  the event may be at a time that does not exist in another timezone (due to daylight saving for example!)

WordPress has a timezone setting ( not yet coping with daylight saving changes!!!) although there are plugins that purport to deal with this.

When you display an ical event listing in your web, my understanding is that we wish to echo the times from the Ical file, perhaps noting the timezone somewhere?

To get our school’s web working correctly, we had to

1. check that google had the right timezone for us  – see settings for your calendar
2. check that our host was reflecting the right timezone for us. This involved setting the timezone in .htaccess to SetEnv TZ :Australia/Sydney, as per https://www2.suresupport.com/faq/38/205
3. check that wordpress had the right timezone (Not sure how much this is impacting the plugin script?   Should the plugin fetch the wordpress timezone, given that it may be wrong?  For now, setting the host server timezone did the trick.

PHP 5 has functionality now to cope with a lot of this, so methinks we need to do a bunch of worked examples to check what needs to be set where for optimal performance… soon.

If you cannot set your host server time, maybe this will helpL:

http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=3123&page

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We would like to have a event listing feature that is really easy to use. From a usability point of view, it would be nice if there was one obvious place to maintain the events and their dates. In addition the school likes to have a paper newsletter for the community. That usually has a upcoming events page sorted by months. It would be nice to print this out from the web. Days of week should be noted to make it easier for parents to remember. From a maintenance point of view, it should be really simple to install and preferably immune to wordpress version upgrades (ie: minimal fiddling to re-install). Starting from the wordpress list I distilled a sub-list for further evaluation. Due to the number on the list, and limited time to bedtime (sleep is a wonderful thing), a bit of judging a book by the cover was applied to the first cut (IE: quality of the presentation, documentation and support for the plug-in was used as an indicator of the quality of the plug-in.)

Worth further evaluation:

• FireTree’s Wpcal Event Calendar 3.1 looks interesting and is well presented. No hack required any more for wordpress 2.0. Uses posts as events with a separate category. The posts can be kept off the “blog” page, but will appear in the recent posts – this maybe useful to also have a new event posting be treated as “news”. One could also have an events category page where one can list all the events and edit from there. (Maybe add an “add an event” link to the template?). I have a concern though about the event dates being stuck down below the post edit screen – not so obvious and easy for a usser who is just thinking about entering a bunch of events.
• Sargant’s simple RS event tracker could be a go- there is a lot to be said for simplicity!
• FahlstadDesign’s WP-Cal looks promising. Relatively easy to install and I like the way that one can add the event straight from the calendar page. Events are separate from posts. The plug-in’s offering page is reasonably well done. But I can see it is easy to accidentally put the wrong date in – how does one change the date? Delete and re-add? more investigation required.
• Sothq’s wp.2.0 only events plug-in – if all else fail, then this could be a go. But not quite as cleanly presented as the others.

So far what I want is a combination of WP-Cal’s ease of adding an event, combined with firetree’s integration to sidebar etc…..

Not quite right

Too cute or a specific purpose not that suitable to ours, or they are just “Post” Calendars – ie: they show a box calendar flagging dates for which there are posts. This is not what we are looking for.

• Peter’s sleeps till date countdown
• Wp-ical not what we are looking for either.
  LiveCalendar
• Calendar 2.0 from “paranoid’s life rambling” has limited explanation and support – not going to explore further.

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