Dev Diary: ITP Day 4

After a couple days off, I jumped back into the event calendar with hopes of having it fully fleshed out, deconstructed and ready for styles to be applied. That would include the main landing page, the individual calendar page, the individual entry page and then any modules that go along with it.

11/21

Solspace Calendar Specific Notes

• {testcalmain/calendars} is the template for the specific calendar pages, i.e.. Holiday Calendar, Business Events, Local Events, etc. This will become events/calendars.
• View specific calendar by month
• View specific calendar by week
• View specific calendar by day

The “View by Day” calendar that I created on 11/16 works for viewing all events on a specific day and viewing specific calendar events (for example, Holiday Events) on a day.

Losses

Started editing the Month calendar. Sinking more time than anticipated into creating a functional “Month” view. Not working as expected.

When all else fails, read the documentation.

The goal with the month view was to create a list of events by day for the entire month. Most people would rather have a traditional table-based calendar layout but I have always found those layouts too small to be functional, especially on a small screen (heck, even on a large screen they’re too small). 

I decided to check out the Solspace Calendar Documentation and found the Advanced Calendar:Month code to be a good start. I pulled out all of the table layout code and now have a basic list of monthly events. 

Wins

After an hour and thirty minutes I have managed to:

• Create a “month view” calendar.
• Create a “day view” calendar.
• Clean up some links that were pointing to default Calendar templates.
• Fix a few title tags.

Calendar Status

The calendar is starting to function as expected. The primary functionality and user flow is in place. 

• Calendar landing page displays a list of today’s events.
• Category specific calendars now display upcoming events specific to that category
• Month View calendar page displays upcoming events for the selected month.

To Be Fixed

• Event details link on Category Calendar page needs fixed.
• Templates to view calendar by Month, Week, Day need to be fixed.

Also Found

• RESS-ee: RESS (Responsive Design + Server Side Components) add-on for ExpressionEngine to detect screen resolution via javascript and then set a variable which you can then access in your templates. Useful for creating Responsive layouts that adapt to users’ screen size and can also conditionally show or hide content.