UT Law Events Calendar
For the past six months my co-worker John Croslin and I have been hammering away at this project, and it’s finally launched: the new University of Texas School of Law Events Calendar. After comparing many popular (and not-so-popular) open source and commercial calendaring projects, it was determined that none of them fully met UT Law’s specific needs and infrastructure, so we tried to figure out which features worked best in each, and started from scratch.
On the surface, the public view has all of the trappings of a fairly generic calendar (grid + list views, date-based navigation, multiple “calendars”, iCalendar downloads), but behind the scenes there’s a fairly impressive feature set. A quick list of what’s going on:
- Entire system designed and built from the ground up, using cross-browser-friendly HTML, CSS, and a dash of jQuery
- Object-oriented PHP with an Oracle backend (which is what we’re running now, but it could be modified easily to use MySQL or PostgreSQL instead)
- Custom workflow routing that hooks into our faculty / staff / student directories and makes efficient use of our special events and media services departments’ resources (if an event requires catering the system notifies our Special Events department for approval, student-submitted events are first screened by the Student Affairs Office, etc.)
- Recurring events are possible with more flexibility than what’s found in Outlook: you can edit most of an event’s details without requiring the removal of the whole series, and you can choose whether changes affect only the single occurrence, if changes ripple forward, or if the changes ripple to all sibling events in the series
- Integration with our Exchange server via Exchange Web Services to provide room availability (free/tentative/busy) info to users when creating new events, to help with room selection
- “Pretty” permalinks that are navigable for all calendar views (for example /calendar/today/ lists the current day’s events, /calendar/2010/08/ displays August, 2010, in a monthly grid view, /calendar/2010/08/faculty-events/ narrows that further to faculty-specific events, etc., and using the date navigation controls doesn’t kick users out of the specific view)
- Coming real soon: iCal/RSS feeds, embeddable calendar widgets, better Exchange integration, mobile views, and more
One week in, it’s already shaping up to be a very useful resource for our users. We might have the code available as an open source download at some point, especially if there’s interest in adapting or extending it. If you’re looking for something right now, you might be interested in the great work being done with UNL Events Publisher and Bedework, two open source projects I took inspiration from. Otherwise, feel free to take a look at what’s happening at UT Law!