[dev] Kronolith Non-Personal Calendar Names

[Ben Klang]

On Apr 1, 2008, at 9:46 AM, Mike Peachey wrote:
> 1. When providing kronolith as a shared calendar solution for a
> business, I am having to expect users to copy and paste long hash
> strings into applications that they want to use to remotely  
> subscribe to
> calendars. This is just about acceptable for the technically  
> proficient
> users, but it *looks* sufficiently complicated that I end up having to
> do it manually for the execs and the marketing/sales/finance staff.
I agree that this is frustrating for a few of my clients as well.   
Having the option, even if only for administrators, to create  
calendars with "friendly" names would be a very welcome change.

>
> 2. I have attempted to modify kronolith's web interface so that  
> instead
> of colouring events based on their category it would colour events  
> based
> upon the calendar the event belongs to. This is necessary for PAs for
> example who are tracking and maintaining events for multiple execs as
> they need to easily differentiate between multiple identical tasks  
> based
> on their owner. I have found it almost completely impossible to do  
> this
> because you effectively have to enter the calendar name hash  
> strings as
> categories and then the colour key at the base of the calendar links
> colours to hash strings, NOT to calendar owners, which to the execs  
> and
> non-technical staff looks like an error.
This has been discussed in the past and the determination at those  
times was that the behavior would not be changed.

That being said I personally agree with your thinking and would love  
to see some way to do this within Kronolith.  The existing category  
system is not well suited to it because of the way it is implemented,  
that is, per-user.  I can only think of two options:
1: Create a Horde configuration to make categories (and category  
colors) system-wide.  The downside to this is that it is Yet Another  
Configurable and that a new mechanism would have to be written for  
Categories that did not rely on Pref storage.

2: Create something that is like categories but is completely  
separate and managed system-wide.  This begs the question: do you  
create this new system only within Kronolith or more generally within  
Horde?  Either way it is likely to be confusing for users and  
probably unnecessarily complex to have *both* categories and whatever  
this new thing is called.

>
> I think it's entirely reasonable to look into another way of naming
> extra calendars that would be more user-friendly and would allow
> modifications to work with calendars based on usable names.
>
> As an example.. ALL calendars could be named like this:
> ${username}.${calendarname}
>
> Then, all users' personal calendars would be called: tom.default,
> jane.default, pointy-haired-boss.default
>
> And additional calendars could be named whatever they wanted like  
> this:
> tom.holidays, jane.holidays, jane.management,
> pointy-haired-boss.management, pointy-haired-boss.financial
>
> This would mean that, when subscribing to calendars remotely, the
> pointy-haired-boss would need this:
> http://horde.domain.tld/rpc.php/kronolith/pointy-haired- 
> boss.financial.ics
To me this sounds like a pretty good idea, but I'm not the Kronolith  
maintainer so I can't comment on whether or not it is feasible.  Also  
it's worth mentioning that we need to either filter how users name  
their calendars (special characters etc) or use the "slug" system  
similar to Whups.

>
> instead of this:
> http://horde.domain.tld/rpc.php/kronolith/ 
> eb4e3b3261f660cc9fcccd7884a512e9.ics
>
> And I, or anybody else, could easily modify the category colouring
> options (possibly as an option in the core of kronolith) so that, when
> colouring by calendar, you simply enter a category with the right
> calendar name rather than an unintelligible hash string and they key
> displayed at the base of the calendar would also be understandable.
>
> Can I get some feedback on this please, people?
> -- 
> Kind Regards,
>

/BAK/

-- 
Ben Klang
Alkaloid Networks LLC
ben at alkaloid.net
404.475.4850
http://projects.alkaloid.net


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