Boys & Girls Clubs of Wichita Falls

[cbuckmore]

As a non-profit organization we are always looking for free and low cost solutions. I was looking for a solution for our calendar of events when I found Plans. I scoured every solution that was in our price range and only found one other that looked almost as sharp as Plans. With a price of free for plans it was hard to beat:)

I am still the process of customizing the calendar but certain features such as the list view have been customized a fair amount to prevent overlap of events on the original list view. As of yet I have been unable to get individual calendar passwords to work. I also reformatted the upcoming_events list and event details popup. I have reformatted the style sheets and added some extra elemens for printing to try to clean up the print. I have removed some spacing in the calendar to compress the view as well as changing some div elements to tables to keep overlap from occurring. Hopefully time permitting I will update the calendar to remove the tabs so that curious visitors don't play around with the calendar controls.

Server:
Windows Server 2003
IIS6.0
ActivePerl

Web Site:
http://www.bgcwf.org

Calendar Installation:
http://www.bgcwf.org/news/plans.cgi

[daltonlp]

Looks nice!

I'd be interested in knowing what the other "looked almost as sharp" candidate was.

Also, feel free to post a question on the forum (under "questions") if you'd like help getting those passwords working.

- Lloyd

[cbuckmore]

The other candidate is at http://www.expinion.net. It is called MultiCalendars. It's not for everyone though because it's based on ASP but for our purposes it would have worked. What I really like about the other calendar was the administration side and the clean look of the controls. My philosophy is that with refinement complex things can look simple. I like the seperation of administrative functions and the user interface and also having multiple managers. I don't exactly like the way you add events to their calendar or modify the calendar though. It seems a little confusing to me.

Don't get me wrong. I think their calendar needs refinement in it's appearance. When you have to span multiple days it only shows the first day. When I had to make a choice of administration or appearance the appearance factor won. From my research the Plans Calendar was far more flexible to change the style without really digging into the code.

I would love to see plans have user and admin seperated at some point. I think that it would be good if all of the template aspects of Plans could be incorporated into the template system intead of having tables or div tags opened and closed inside code. This way someone could truly modify the style and theme and still get updates without worrying about breaking the code. Right now to update I would have to modify the new code to reflect the style changes. The names of elements on the style sheets can be a little confusing as to their function and scope and the explainations are a somewhat sparse. Maybe time permitting a help section on the scope and function of different style sheet elements as well as files such as plans.template would help clear up some confusion.

It's always good to find a programmer who is so open to new ideas. If I add any new features to our installation I think would be useful to others I will let you know. In any case Great Work

-Craig