Pacific Coast Mothers Club

couchmouse · Joined: 09 Mar 2005 Posts: 18

Have been looking at several open-source and $$ web calendars for one of my clients sites. Came across PLANS and my looking is done. Has the basic features I wanted and easy to customize.

I did a number of modifications to this. I liked the basic look of the wood skin with the 3d look and went from there. I still have some more work to do. Thinking about removing the add/edit on the bottom and adding a "admin" link to an admin calendar and tying the two together. <----(done). Admin calendar done and linked. Actually got the idea from the way watorrey.net has their event calendar set up and modified it further

anyways here what I have done so far<---Done now

http://www.pacificcoastmothersclub.org/calendar.htm
(link updated)

Scott · Guest

Hello:

I went out and took a look at your calendar. Vey nice looking. I assume you did some editing in the plans.css file.

Could you please share some of the deltails of what you did to yours?

Thanks!

couchmouse · Joined: 09 Mar 2005 Posts: 18

I liked the dimensional look of the "wood" theme so I installed that first as a starting point. Then it was just a matter of modifying the plans.css and plans.template files to add my own image.files and #colors and commenting out  or adding the <html> that I wanted. I also took the above logo on this page and modified it to make a transparent .gif file for the link back to planscalendar.com.

couchmouse · Joined: 09 Mar 2005 Posts: 18

To admin the calendar I made a <link> at the bottom of the "public" calendar to a parallel installation of a fully functional Plans "admin" calendar. When accessed, the "public" calendar "reads" and gets its information from the "admin" calendar. All event additions, edits, deletions, etc. are done in the "admin" calendar. The "admin" calendar has "password" disabled in the config and is, instead, protected by an .htaccess file allowing only "authorized" people to ever see the "admin" calendar. BTW you can't put the .htaccess file in the " admin plans cgi-bin" directory (it would keep the "public" calendar from reading the "admin" calendar) it has to go somewhere else.
"admin" calendar is using a MySQL db and "public" a flat file since it does not really store anything.

Scott · Guest

WOW that is some really good information. Thanks so much for sharing this with us!!!!!!!

So you did not have to do anything to your plans_config.pl, us_english.pl, or your color_select.css?

couchmouse · Joined: 09 Mar 2005 Posts: 18

No modifications to color_select.css (not used in "public" calendar) available in "admin". No modifications to us_english.pl. Modifications to plans_config.pl were done for the specific calendars, such as, "password" ON for public calendar (incase someone does directory searches) "password" OFF for admin (using .htaccess, instead, at the front door). Other usual .config changes... specifing "paths", what "database" to use, disable/enable certain features, etc.

(update)There is 0 (yea) bugs I still have to work out (down from 5 lol) on this setup. I did have to edit 6 lines in the "admin" plans.cgi

The developer of this program (Dalton) did a good job laying out the feature set of this calendar. It is highly configurable, customizable, and easy to install. I have really not found anything that can't be done with it. And I have looked at and tried a lot of calendars, both open-source and $$$$, to find the "right" one for this non-profit org. website. The closest one is WebCalendar Creator, very nice but $$$

daltonlp · Site Admin Joined: 24 Nov 2003 Posts: 1482

The feature set was never really laid out. Very Happy

It just evolved.

It's worth mentioning that the super-secret upcoming feature list is now public, as of a couple days ago:

http://planscalendar.com/doc/doku.php?id=dev%3Astart

I'd be interested to know if there are any features that webCalendar Creator has and Plans lacks.

- Lloyd

couchmouse · Joined: 09 Mar 2005 Posts: 18

webcalendar_creator is a "program" that is installed on your pc AND on the server. The only feature webCalendar Creator has and Plans lacks is Creator has a "control panel" on the pc side that allows easy, complete modification of the "look" of the calendar.
The downside.. It costs $50.00 usd for one seat and only allows control of "one single" calendar. Adding events, changes, etc can only be done on the one pc that has the software installed. If you want multiple calendars it is $240.00 usd. And if you want multiple seats it is $2000.00 usd (LOL)
I ran a trial version for 1 month to check it out.

And for all that........ Plans still looks, works and feels better.

I also installed and tried out several open-source calendars before Plans.