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#1 2018-04-23 17:10:27

jayrope
Plugin Author
From: Berlin
Registered: 2006-07-06
Posts: 687
Website Mastodon

Calendar without using article?

I need to implement a calendar with the following features:
One individual calendar per author, content hidden from other users,
and another general calendar for all authors to use together,
but without using an article per event.

The site i am working on already contains thousands of articles. I fear, that if i start using articles for events in calendars, that number will very soon be 10 times as high. Maybe i am wrong about this. I considered smd_calendar, but since it uses articles for events i have put it aside.

Anyone has any recommendations? Maybe a third-party open source/free software, that integrates well with TXP (potentially 4.7++)??

Thank you for any hints.


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#2 2018-04-24 20:38:05

jakob
Admin
From: Germany
Registered: 2005-01-20
Posts: 4,578
Website

Re: Calendar without using article?

A couple of loose ideas:

As far as I know smd_calender is the only currently working event manager with anything approaching that degree of complexity.

I had a look on the old plugin repository and almost all of them use articles for saving events and are long orphaned. About the only one of them that seems to use a separate database table and separate interface tab is jmc_event_manager but it is also some ten years old and I highly doubt it works without some serious updating. There is an old GitHub repo of it here if you want to take a look.

If you do wish to go with smd_calendar, you may be able to achieve a half-way good solution with a combination of mrd_for_your_eyes_only (which I think I posted a link to for you once before) and an own dashboard tab (e.g. smd_tabber). With mrd_for_your_eyes_only you could stop the events showing up in Content › Articles list (although they are still articles) and with smd_tabber, you could create an own pane, or part of your user dashboard, that lists the logged-in user’s event articles with a link to the regular article edit pane (the one you normally get when you click on the edit/id in the article list). Hiding all event articles from others means they can’t see other people’s articles and writing your own article list tag for your dashboard pane means you can list only your author’s event articles as edit links. I suspect it doesn’t prevent finding other articles using the search function.

—-

Otherwise, I’d had related ideas, though not for something as complicated as you suggest but I’ve not had time to try them out yet.

On several sites I have things like a slider, a news ticker, or a simple upcoming events list. I too use articles for these (mostly with csb_if_newer_than) but, as you say, over time the article list clogs up with lots of smaller articles. Quite often these have a similar name to actual articles and even start piling up when you use the search function. Additionally, as articles without an actual address, you have to make sure your rss feed or sitemap doesn’t generate links for them and that google doesn’t add them to its search results.

For a long while, I’ve been wondering if these might be better farmed out into a separate plugin with an own database table and an own list and edit pane in the admin area. Whether they’re slider slides, newsticker messages, simple upcoming message bulletins, or content blocks on a homepage without an attached article, they’re basically content snippets with a few fields. Compared with an article, they are mostly fairly simple. The advantage would be that they would be entirely separate of the articles, could be listed by date and wouldn’t appear as an own url in the rss feed or sitemap. The disadvantage is that you lose all the in-built functionality of the txp:article(_custom) tag and of all the associated helper tags like if_first and if_last tags and plenty more. So you’re going to end up rewriting / replicating a lot of the functionality that is already there. Plus all the tags to output the item’s contents. I’m still undecided.

Really this is where I hope the custom_field types in future versions of txp will make it possible to pave the way towards different content types.


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#3 2018-04-27 13:14:56

jayrope
Plugin Author
From: Berlin
Registered: 2006-07-06
Posts: 687
Website Mastodon

Re: Calendar without using article?

Thank you, Jakob for those evaluations.
I have yet to look into mrd_for_your_eyes_only.

However, to separate smd_calendar from the rest of article, did anyone try to install it into a separate textpattern database and maybe invoke that with rah_swap or something similar?


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