[dev] Kronolith Non-Personal Calendar Names

[Mike Peachey]

Ben Klang wrote:
> 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.

I'm glad you agree :-) It's not just me.

>> 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. 
 >> <snip>
> 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.  
 > <snip>
> 2: Create something that is like categories but is completely separate 
> and managed system-wide.
 > <snip>

TBH, at least in the short term, I don't think it's necessary to go so 
complex with it.

When I started to attempt to mod kronolith to colour by user I actually 
found it lending itself to the task quite well. The reason for this 
being that categories are effectively free text fields used for matching.

I actually got very far with it before giving up when coming up against 
hash names and what I ended up with was a simple config option to decide 
whether you want your colouring category names to match against event 
"category" fields, or "owner" fields.

For the personal calendars this meant that all you had to do was to 
enter a username instead of an arbitrary category name and bingo - all 
events matching that owning user were coloured with the selected colour.

It's only a short step from there to expect users to enter 
username.calendarname as a category and change the input dialog so that 
IFF the user has selected per-calendar colouring, change the text to 
talk about users and calendars instead of categories.

HOWEVER

Having said all that, as I found out, it's almost useless to speculate 
unless something is done to sanitise (sic) the naming of non-personal 
calendars.

>> I think it's entirely reasonable to look into another way of naming
>> extra calendars <snip> example.. <snip> like this:
>> ${username}.${calendarname}
>>
> 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. 

Who is?

 > 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.

Yes, I had considered this issue, but decided that it's simply a 
necessary part of the development process for something like this that, 
while not completely trivial, shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

>> Can I get some feedback on this please, people?
> /BAK/

Thank you :)
-- 
Kind Regards,

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Mike Peachey, IT
Tel: +44 114 281 2655
Fax: +44 114 281 2951
Jennic Ltd, Furnival Street, Sheffield, S1 4QT, UK
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http://www.jennic.com
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