MODx | Kalender Enhanced | 0.1
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to view the actual event page before or after the event has taken place, because MODx will force the document to be unpublished.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
MODx Framework | Calendar Solutions
I headed up to Batesville this week to meet w/ a new client who also happens to be a College / University. We (Pleth)were recently awarded the bid for their project. This project basically consists of completely re-building their web presence from the ground up. In preparation for our meeting Greg and I (mostly Greg) have been getting our minds around the MODx PHP framework, we know for sure that this is the framework we are going to be using for the project, it’s just that impressive.
We are in the early stages of the project right now, our Graphic Artist is providing mockups right now for the committee to approve and sign off on but in the meantime Greg and I spent some time sitting at our board table going over the finer points of the MODx PHP Framework on the big screen and putting our heads together on a few of the other components we are going to need for this project.
Since MODx is somewhat “modular” in it’s architecture we know that we are going to be able to utilize a pretty vast library of options including snippets and chunks contributed by the open source community. One topic we were discussing was an online calendar system for the project.
I have spent a little time and researched the MODx Resource lIbrary, we are likely to plug each of these options into our sandbox environment and figure out which one we are the most comfortable with:
- Event Calendar contributed by Dazze
- Kalendar contributed by Deevio (inspired by phpevent calendar os)
- Kalendar Enhanced by Joey Livingston (example of calendar in use)
- Easy Events contributed by Honeydew Design
Another option that Greg and I discussed today on the phone was the possibility of integrating an already existing “Google Calendar” into the MODx framework, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s an alternative for doing this as well. Google has went out of their way to make Google Tools such as Google Docs, Google Base, Gmail, etc., available to Universities and Educational Institutions. This could be an option for this project…
- Google Events contributed by Jesster444
Just wanted to post these notes regarding the Calendar Solution for this project so that I can refer back to them and update them as we move forward on this project. For additional information about the MODx framework also visit Greg’s blog, he is also adding his notes for this project as we continue to get familiar with MODx.
MODx | EventCalendar
While browsing through the MODx Repository for Snippets of Code that were contributed by other developers out there I ran across an app that I am sure we will use down the road on a client project, it’s the EventCalendar. This integrates an Event Calendar to a MODx project by just adding a little bit of code. Pretty slick. I also found a few other calendar plugins out there but this one looked to be one of the most promising ones…
MODx Content Management System | EventCalendar
MODx Repository
I stumbled across this section of the MODx support website this evening and spent a little bit of time looking at what all is out there in terms of plugins. There are three plugins that are highlighted and probably 3 of the most commonly used snippets or plugins. This repository is constantly being updated as best I can tell, I have seen quite a few new additions since the last time I was on this page…
- Wayfinder – This is a high-end navigation builder that plugs right into MODx and allows you to create your navigation as you go along. It apparently generates some pretty clean code as well based on the examples I have seen of it. It’s currently in version 2.0. (more info)
- eForm – This is a form generation tool that allows you to build an online form and have the results sent to a user by email. (more info)
- Ditto - This addin is an aggregator of sorts that allows you to add Blog type documents to your website. It’s also referenced to be pretty effective as a news aggregate as well. I am planning on spending some time investigating Ditto a little heavier because it has some features that interest me. One of the things that interests me the most is that it allows you to take advantage of external data classes. My initial thoughts are regarding some of the applications that I have written for my clients that currently run under a seperate login. I am going to probably publish a little more info on Ditto once I learn some more about it… (more info)
MODx Content Management System | Resources
MODx | Anti-Spam Email Plugin
If you have ever had your email address published on a website you know first hand how annoying the spambots can be. These spambots cruise the web looking for email addresses that can be harvested and added to spam databases. There are several tactics that a web developer can take to try to curb or prevent this from happening but these approaches can sometimes be time intensive to say the least. I found a plugin tonight for MODx that appears to be the answer to this dilemma. Click on the link at the bottom of this post for info on the Anti-Spam Plugin, here’s a description from the repository…
Automatically encodes all email addresses in your site to unicode, this removes the plain text string of your email address from the source code, making it very hard to find. It is believed that this will stop spam-bots being able to find your email address, but is not guaranteed.
MODx Content Management System | Anti-Spam Email Plugin
