My partner Greg and I have been playing around in our MODx sandbox installation this morning with Kalender Enhanced, a calendar plugin for MODx. We looked at like 2 different installations of other Calendar systems and came to the conclusion that this is our favorite. The only drawbacks I had really with this one on the front end without digging around is how the end user is going to interact with the calendar. Calendar entries have two “tv’s” start date and end date. On the first go around I totally missed how this worked and couldn’t figure out why my entries weren’t showing up. The other drawback I had was initially I couldn’t figure out where to drop the entries until I figured out the folder thing below the text editor. These are two very minor things that I am pretty sure I can get my mind around and we can simplify for our client.
Here’s a little information about the Kalendar Plugin from the MODx Repository:
As the title implies, I took the fantastic Kalender snippet by Danny van Ommen and Wim Beerens and did quite a bit of enhancement. The calendar now displays in a wide format (870px; can be changed), with large cells for each day of the month. Events that take place on each day are listed in summary form. Floating your mouse over each event brings up a more detailed summary. Each event links to the corresponding document that represents that event.
The original Kalendar used the pub_date and unpub_date to mark the date and time of each event. This is problematic, however, if you want to view the actual event page before or after the event has taken place, because MODx will force the document to be unpublished. Kalendar Enhanced uses two custom TVs, ‘StartTime’ and ‘EndTime’. This way, you can mark your event time without effecting its published status, allow the links in the calendar to lead to active pages.
Works very much like Easy PHP Calendar’s “Text on Calendar” mode. Very powerful for simple scheduling.There is currently an active instance of this snippet running on my photography site that you can view as a demo. There isn’t a whole lot on it right now, but if you jump around to the different months, especially December 2007, you’ll see at least one event December 1st.
MODx Content Management System | Kalender Enhanced | 0.1
This kind of confirms some of what myself and my partner Greg were noticing last night. A lot of websites CNN included were acting very erradically, for instance, the site would load but there would be no stylesheet attached to it. Greg noticed that he couldn’t get into MSN either. While on the phone with Greg I connected our server administrator on the line and asked him to check these major websites from his location and about that time the sites started rendering correctly again. It was an oddity that to this point I haven’t really seen an explanation for posted online until now. Here’s a link to a post on WHIR about CNN’s reported issues, Web Host Industry News | CNN Site Still Unstable, says Netcraft, I think for the most part CNN’s biggest problem is that Jack Cafferty somehow managed to tick off the Chinese! 
I have been on the phone w/ Conway Corporation today troubleshooting my static ip address that has just suddenly disappeared and while this is frustrating to say the least I find it pretty hard to be disappointed with my ISP. ConwayCorp does a pretty good job with their Internet service, they even have some free wireless hotspots around town, here’s an excerpt from their website. I have heard they are working to add even more so this is not a complete list by any means. Even though I am bragging on them in my blog it probably doesn’t replace the “deflated” feeling when my phone number shows up on their caller id’s. 
I was surfing the web today looking at some CSS and Standards Related Articles and stumbled onto a pretty cool find. It’s a product that WESTCIV, the folks that rolled out Style Master (Topstyle’s Competition), had on the market a while back. It’s still available for download from their website. For an old-school tables based designer like me, this might be doable. Here’s an excerpt from their site about Layout Master and the Download Link. 
I didn’t realize how out of date my Xampp installation was until I was reading a blog entry announcing the release of version 1.6x. If you aren’t familiar with what exactly Xampp does, in a nutshell it puts all of the components you need for your development environment right on your development machine, even windows boxes. Xampp is an easy-to-install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. Compared to many other software products in its category like Apache2Triad, XAMPP is much better in my opinion as it is easier to use, has more features, and also allows you to switch between PHP versions in seconds. It is a complete web, database and FTP server package. Xampp is not only available for Windows, I know some folks who run Macs that use Xampp. Here’s a shortlist of what’s included:
