PHPicalendar 2.4 alpha

[Parasyte]

I've been hacking away at phpicalendar for quite a few months, fixing numerous bugs and even adding a few features here and there. Jim Hu expressed interest in the work when I briefly discussed it with him some time ago. Today, I decided to commit the full patchset (CVS patchset 1260) so that it can be better tested.

This update contains some big changes to templates. Specifically, most of the duplicate *.tpl files between templates have been deleted. This just means any required files will be pulled out of the templates/default/ directory. There is a new CSS class within default.css (one file in each template directory) called "maintable" You can style this class with a width of 100% (as an example) to make all pages variable-width, instead of the default of ~1000 static pixels. These template changes may cause issues when upgrading if your calendar templates have been modified.

The first noticeable change is the formation of tables. Almost all tables are now using the CSS2 table-layout attribute, with a value of "fixed". This forces compliant browsers to render table cells with exactly equal widths/spacing. This has been tested successfully in: Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.0, Firefox 3.5, and Safari 4.

The next noticeable difference is the addition of "Nice-Titles" http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/nicetitle/ The current implementation puts the CSS and background image into the root directory, instead of making these template-dependent. This could probably be changed, with some testing. Nice-Title works as a JavaScript that creates a partially transparent floating division when you hover your cursor over a link element with a title attribute. PHPicalendar puts event descriptions/additional information into link titles. With JavaScript enabled, you will get HTML/CSS-ized titles with pretty styling. Some CSS3 is used in this feature to add round borders and text-shadow. These two CSS3 features only work in (as mentioned tested above) Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4.

Nice-Title has some "configurable" options, too. Open nicetitle.js and you will find available configurable variables at the top of the script. The defaults are OK for more installations, but some might prefer to disable FOLLOW_MOUSE, for example.

Several other important XSS fixes have also been integrated with the changes required for Nice-Title. HTML tags should now be fully stripped, and special characters (tab, line break) should be properly converted for HTML output.

Additional changes are listed in the README.

This is a very large patch (several changes made to 60 files) so it needs a lot of testing. Anyone willing to help with testing can pull the latest revision from CVS and give it a go.

[jimhu]

Thanks to Parasyte for all the work while I've been too busy to do anything besides delete spam posts!

[Parasyte]

I'm glad to help out. Thanks for cleaning the spam around here!

And I am still finding small bugs after all the patches. Recently we had a calendar event that went from 16:30 Tuesday to 16:30 Wednesday. I noticed two problems with it: First, the end of the event was drawn (in day and week views) 15 minutes longer than it was supposed to be. That was worked around by checking the event length as well as the start and end times being the same. Second, that day-spanning event was breaking my fixed tables in week view pretty badly. It was also moving other events up a whole day. Eventually I found the culprit was the "event_overlap" variable was not being set properly on the second half of the event (in masterarray).

While I was working with this particular code path, I also decided to add some new icons to show that an event spans more than a day; there's an icon for the start of a long event, which is an arrow pointing left to a wall. This is the same kind of icon used in Mozilla Calendar (Lightning/Sunbird) 0.9. There's an icon for the "middle" of a long event (which neither starts or ends on that day); two arrows pointing away from each other. And the third icon is for the end of the event; this is a mirror of the first one. It looks nice, an helps to distinguish single long events in week view. It also helps to show in day view that the event starts earlier and ends later than what is actually drawn.

The code base is fairly difficult to wrap your head around. But it works for what it is. Anyway, there's my technical digression for the week.

I'm still watching closely for any bugs that might have been introduced, and latent bugs that have been hard to spot.

[freakazoid]

Haven't checked this project in months!
Just came by and I'm glad to see a new major release.

WIll test this in the next couple of days and give my feedback.

Cheers gang!

[EDIT]
Okay I'm back! Just wondering how to download the 2.4 alpha from the CVS.
If anyone can give me any pointers so I can test out the alpha, that would be great.

[Parasyte]

If you have a CVS client, there are instructions on sourceforge for gaining anonymous repository access: http://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=cvs&group_id=62270

There's something wrong with forum attachments here, so I cannot attach a copy of the current alpha. I might be able to upload it somewhere.

[jimhu]

Try attachments again. There was a permissions problem.

[Parasyte]

OK, attempting to attach the 2.4alpha release again. This should be very close to what will be released.

The attachment size limit is only 256KB, so I had to use bzip2 to compress it enough.

[montlewis]

Nice job! 2.4a is working really well for me. Thanks! Monty

[Parasyte]

Good to hear it. I've been running it here at my work for ~120 read-only users, and about 5 users with write access (using Thunderbird+Lightning and Apache+mod_dav)

[bsm2003]

Unsure what is hapening with this but same 2 folders uploaded to the same server on different sites. The site i needto work will not display properly and the second site displays the calendars perfect.
Main site is http://www.farriscreeklodge.org/
Production Calendar 1 is http://www.farriscreeklodge.org/activities running 2.24
Production calendar 2 is http://www.farriscreeklodge.org/dist11 running 2.24
testing folder 1 http://www.farriscreeklodge.org/cal 2.4alpha
testing folder 2 http://www.farriscreeklodge.org/calendar 2.4alpha
Testing folder 3 http://www.moorecountyhighalumni.net/calendar 2.4alpha
testing folder 4 http://www.moorecountyhighalumni.net/cal 2.4alpha

all 4 testing are the same except for the calendar location.

server is mandriva linux 2010.0 apache 2.2.14 php is 5.3.1

Anygueses as to why this is happening?

[bsm2003]

Never mind I got i figured out by the time this got approved.

[jimhu]

Sorry, I've been swamped. I don't like having to moderate posts, but the spam was out of control

[Parasyte]

I'm looking forward to a new release, soon. I've been informed by Jim that he is planning to do some more work on it. Maybe a few more bugs for me to fix, and patches to commit. But I think 2.4 is ready for release.

[johnstringer]

Hi Parasyte,

I was wondering if there will be added functionality to include attachments in 2.4? i.e. if we have files attached in iCal, can they be transferred to become a link in PHPiCalendar?

tia,

John

[Parasyte]

Unfortunately, no.

We ran into the same problem at our organization, where attachments added to events (in Thunderbird) are nowhere to be found in phpiCalendar. So I'm aware of the issue, but have not written any code to add support for it.

I believe (if I am not mistaken; I haven't read through the ICS specification/RFC) that attachments are just base64-encoded values stored within the event. That would require some additional parser work, at the least. Ideally, I would also want some kind of caching mechanism so the parser didn't have to run every time someone downloaded an attachment. That could get tricky, since we don't use a database. (How do you associate files to events? It's not enough to rely on the file name alone; two different events can have different attachments with the same name. Maybe a hash over the original file name, event time, and UID?)