Topic: Google Calendar vs... ???

[micah]

At work, a client is looking for a fairly robust calendar system which we have no desire to program from scratch.  I've been tasked with researching a good 3rd party application to integrate into their site...

while it seems there are a lot out there, they almost all suck.  The top of the search results finds http://www.easyphpcalendar.com which doesn't seem that bad.  Another one  is http://www.planscalendar.com.  I'm not exactly overwhelmed with either of them and they would both still require heavy customization.

Honestly, I really want to suggest to the client that they just set up a google calendar.  It does almost everything they want (although I'd have to build some custom pages utilizing the google API to allow for a couple features they need that are not availbable).

Anyone have any thoughts on the matter? can you suggest a better product?

[hans]

There were a couple javascript calendar libraries I'd found before when looking to build my own, but they'd also require you to populate them. They looked very Google like.

I'll try and find the links again.

[micah]

javascript calendars would be cool too, as long as they have a server-side backend, presumably php/mysql

In the past Ive just sort used a quick calendar class to custom make a calendar or used a pre-made javascript pop-up calendar but this client wants a lot of bells and whistles, including different views (week, month, list); categories/sub-calendars; search-ability; and the ability to have web users submit events that they later approve and post to the calendar.

[Dumah]

I had to design a calendar interface for a web app I wrote. In the end I wrote it myself in django/python and had a cron job running each day to post reminders and stuff.

My first instinct was to adapt something else for this use, but I found that to get something that did precisely what I wanted was going to be just as tough as coding it.

[ober]

I suggest Google Calendar as well.  It has everything and it's very easy to use and integrate plus it save you a lot of time in developing or customizing.

[micah]

I don't think the google calendar proposal went over all that well.  They liked the features but not the idea that its not very customizable style-wise and that its branded as a google product.     oh well.

[Dumah]

If you have a library that makes it easy to work with months, weeks and days (I used Python's calendar library) its not hard.

Here's how I did it - create objects to represent appointments, reminders, meetings (or whatever) and give them a date and time field. Then filter them by the month you want to view, use the calendar object to build the calendar for that month, use it to draw a HTML table with a cell for each day. If you have an object for that day colour it differently and add a link to a page for items for that day.

That was a hack and didn't take any real time in comparison to rest of the app.

At least if you roll your own and get the basics right you can easily add the functionality that the customers will go for. Remember, you don't have to recreate google calendar - just give therm the bits they want.

[micah]

so I had a genius thought and, as usual with all my genius ideas, it turns out someone else beat me to it (which is fine this time because it saves me the work.)

instead of simply sticking the google calendar in an iframe, call the link with PHP, parse it as needed and insert my own CSS to re-style it however I want!

enter this guy: http://www.restylegc.com/   

I'm going to revamp my proposal tomorrow