[kronolith] Calendar standards discussion on #oscom (freenode.net)

Tue Mar 2 11:25:52 PST 2004

OSCOM organizes events, promotes standards and undertakes projects to
further the state of the art of Open Source Content Management. OSCOM
promotes Open Source Content Management solutions as powerful,
affordable and flexible replacements for proprietary products.
http://oscom.org/

marclaporte: Tiki CMS/Groupware project admin
iansym: Xaraya Calendar author (and previously worked on PostCalendar)
gregor: http://oscom.org/

Some unrelated entries have been snipped...

[12:06]<marclaporte> Here is what I would like Open Source CMS projetcs
to collaborate on:
[12:06]<marclaporte> Calendar data sharing (RSS feeds for calendars)
[12:07]<marclaporte> Spreadsheet applet
[12:07]<marclaporte> WYSIWYG editing with multilingual spellchecker.
[12:07]<marclaporte> CMSML
[12:07]<marclaporte> More collaboration with cmsreview.com and oscom.org
[12:07]<marclaporte> LGPL Syncml solution in the PHP community
(Phpgroupware, Egroupware, Horde, Tiki CMS/Groupware, moregroupware,
Tutos, etc)
[12:07]<michi> Calendar +1
[12:09]<gregor> why not build on ical for calendars
[12:10]<marclaporte> gregor: it could be anything
[12:10]<marclaporte> gregor: but the current situation is not good
[12:20]<marclaporte> let's find a calendar standard and I'll be happy!!
[12:22]<gregor> marclaporte, what do you need for calendars? it seems to
me there are good standards available
[12:23]<marclaporte> gregor: I want to aggregate calendar info
[12:24]<gregor> that seems a client side issue more than a standards issue
[12:24]<marclaporte> I want to reuse my PostCalendar info in my Tiki
installation
[12:24]<gregor> for instance, mozilla calendar lets me aggregate
different calendars
[12:25]<marclaporte> yes, moz cal is nice
[12:25]<marclaporte> I want that web-based
[12:25]<gregor> then i'd strongly suggest reading / wrting of ical
[12:25]<marclaporte> I I have looked at lots of projects
[12:25]<gregor> maybe i should grab roger raymond for this discussion :)
[12:25]<damian> I think the tiki calendar has some fields for ical, they
are just not used
[12:26]<gregor> roger = postcalendar author
[12:26]<marclaporte> ho!
[12:26]<marclaporte> get him!!!
[12:26]<marclaporte> http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/09/21.html#a801
[12:26]<marclaporte> "Ray Ozzie reminds us what a fiasco calendars still
are: "
[12:26]<gregor> hmm.. "iansym has been idle 824 minutes,"
[12:27]<gregor> marclaporte, i suggest you invite roger: roger at xaraya.com
[12:28]<gregor> i'm sure he would be happy to lurk in here
[12:31]<marclaporte> mail sent
[12:31]<gregor> i looked into calendaring a while ago
[12:32]<gregor> it even has some w3c activity
[12:51]  *** iansym joined #oscom
[12:51]<gregor> there he is :)
[12:51]<gregor> marclaporte, you have the stage.
[12:52]<marclaporte> roger?
[12:53]<iansym> can you give me a minute
[12:53]<marclaporte> sure ;-)
[12:53]<iansym> have to do something here at the house - be back in a sec
[12:54]<marclaporte> I'll write my intro in the mean time
[12:54]<marclaporte> I manage many sites
[12:55]<marclaporte> Rss is cool because I can easily interchange news info
[12:55]<marclaporte> BTW, I use Postcalendar
[12:55]<marclaporte> on one of my sites
[12:56]<marclaporte> I like the interface a LOT
[12:56]<marclaporte> I have done lots of research for the perfect
calendar app
[12:57]<marclaporte> mose of the feature wishlist is here:
http://tikiwiki.org/CalendarDev
[12:58]<marclaporte> I would like Tiki powered sites to reciprocally
subscribe to and share calendar feeds with other cms /calendar apps.
[12:58]<marclaporte> By categorizing (geographical or subjects) we could
aggregrate calendar information to show at a glance all the upcoming
events in a given city or all the events for a given subject.
[12:58]<marclaporte> Basically, I want rss feeds for calendars.
[12:58]<marclaporte> Mozilla Calendar does a nice job
[12:59]<marclaporte> I want this buut web-based
[12:59]<marclaporte> More importantly, as many as possible calendar apps
would need to provide feeds
[12:59]<marclaporte> This is not the case currently
[13:03]<marclaporte> http://phpicalendar.sourceforge.net/nuke/  has a
very nice interface but doesn't let you manage events
[13:03]<iansym> phpicalendar is nice, but it's merely a class to display
icalendar files
[13:04]<iansym> i would suggest using icalendar as the file format for
aggregating your events
[13:04]<iansym> the ical standards also consits of protocols for doing this
[13:05]<iansym> though, you could create rss feeds if you wanted to - i
just find that to be less effective, especially if you want to share the
events in other calendar apps
[13:06]<marclaporte> does PostCalendar generate these feeds?
[13:07]<iansym> i've never implemented anything like that in it
[13:07]<iansym> I no longer dev postcalendar - the postnuke devs do -
they adopted the project
[13:07]<marclaporte> that seems to be the problem with mose of the OS
calendar apps I've looked at
[13:07]<iansym> i'm working on timezones, datetime and calendar issues
for Xaraya now
[13:08]<marclaporte> ok, does XarCal generate these feeds?
[13:08]<iansym> xarcal is not complete
[13:08]<iansym> xarcal is based on icalendar standards
[13:08]<iansym> meaning: it uses the same methods for data definitions
[13:08]<marclaporte> There seems to be a problem with the standard
[13:08]<iansym> not necessarily the same file structure
[13:09]<iansym> it will export icalendar files for import into other
apps (like mozilla calendar)
[13:09]<iansym> what problems do you see?
[13:09]<marclaporte> import or subscribe?
[13:09]<iansym> either or
[13:09]<marclaporte> The problem is "nobody" is doing it
[13:09]<iansym> heh - Mozilla Calendar does it
[13:10]<iansym> apple ical does it
[13:10]<iansym> Outlook kinda does it
[13:10]<iansym> no open source cms really does it but iirc Horde's
Kronolith supports it to some degree and phpicalendar can display them
[13:10]<iansym> icalendar is mainly a file format
[13:10]<marclaporte> Yes, but with my MozCal, can I subscribe to a
postnuke powered site? drupal powered site? tiki powered site? xaraya
powered site?
[13:11]<marclaporte> Kronolith, ah good
[13:11]<iansym> not unless they provide something in icalendar format to
push into your calendar - either via webdav or some other method
[13:11]<gregor> it seems oscom could promote ical the same way it does
webdav
[13:12]<iansym> basically, subscribing to a calendar in Moz Cal is via
webdav
[13:12]<marclaporte> We need a solution which is shared hosting friendly
[13:12]<iansym> marcel and I played with that over at xaraya one day to
see how it worked
[13:12]<gregor> iansym: yeah i sent him a little howto :)
[13:12]<iansym> heh
[13:13]<gregor> it works quite nicely
[13:13]<iansym> yep
[13:13]<iansym> we were able to edit the same calendar file from two
different places - it was quite nice
[13:13]<marclaporte> Any opinion on: http://www.esfstandard.org/
[13:14]<gregor> hmm, so if your cms supports webdav you get that for free :)
[13:15]<iansym> hmm, i'm not familiar with this - i'll have to look it over
[13:16]<gregor> uhmm.. it embeds as CDATA in rss?
[13:16]<gregor> evil :)
[13:16]<marclaporte> I have found quite a few standards...
[13:16]<marclaporte>
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/02mar/I-D/draft-ietf-calsch-many-xcal-01.txt
[13:16]<iansym> yep... i just noticed that
[13:16]<iansym> the xcal standard seems to have vanished
[13:16]<gregor> there is also a module for rss 1.0 iirc
[13:16]<gregor> xcal and its rdf friends
[13:17]<iansym> rfc2445 is the ical standards doc at ietf
[13:17]<gregor> http://greg.abstrakt.ch/archives/001388.html
[13:17]<gregor> http://greg.abstrakt.ch/archives/000170.html
[13:17]<gregor> my notes on calendaring
[13:17]<iansym> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt
[13:19]<marclaporte> lots of reading...
[13:19]<marclaporte> Nice thing about standards is there's so many to
choose from
[13:19]<gregor> reading of calendars would be easy with just exposing ical
[13:20]<gregor> if you want to write too, you pretty much need webdav
[13:20]<iansym> yep
[13:20]<gregor> which is another standard oscom cheerleads :)
[13:20]<iansym> the main storage backend for xarcal will be the DB - if
you want to export a calendar it can be done to .ics at first or other
methods later
[13:20]<iansym> heh
[13:21]<iansym> http://simiansynapse.com/calendar
[13:21]<iansym> anyway - these are some IRC chat logs from the #calendar
room at xaraya as well as the initial (going to be reworked) db schema
[13:21]<iansym> there's a lot to do really
[13:22]<iansym> you'll probably notice this db schema doesn't look
anything like PostCalendar's
[13:22]<iansym> in fact, it would probably be wise for someone to Port
xarcal to postnuke when it's done
[13:22]  *** iansym most likely will not do it
[13:22]<gregor> lol
[13:23]<iansym> they may also be interested in the timezone module
[13:23]<marclaporte> gregor: this is nice:
http://greg.abstrakt.ch/archives/000170.html
[13:23]<iansym> it automatically support changes to and from DST for all
timezones based on the zoneinfo public database
[13:24]<gregor> marclaporte the bottom line is you need to start small
[13:24]<marclaporte> hmmm
[13:24]<gregor> calendaring is a "boil the ocean" proposition if you
want to do it all
[13:24]<gregor> i'd suggest to start with ical support
[13:25]<gregor> just expose your data as ical and it can be read
[13:25]<gregor> should be trivial to do ical, its a simple format
[13:26]<iansym> the export mechanism can be just about anything really
[13:26]<iansym> it's making sure the backend supports most of the features
[13:27]<iansym> so taking a standard like ical and supporting what it
supports, will lend to a good amount of export types
[13:27]<iansym> whether it be .ics, .rdf, .rss whatever
[13:27]<iansym> in fact, that output will all be generated by templates
[13:27]<iansym> acting on the core data
[13:28]<iansym> so, i don't feel sharing/subscribing is a really
difficult issue to tackle
[13:28]<gregor> which is good :)
[13:28]<iansym> once the backend data entry/retreival is in place the
export should just fall in line

M ;-)

--
Marc Laporte
http://tikiwiki.org/UserPagemarclaporte