Event Calendar Utopia

R_J · July 2013

Vision

Events PlugIn

I want a plugin that allows creation of events with following fields:

titel (text)
description (textarea)
place (text)
min number of participants (integer)
max number of participants (integer)
start time (text)
end time (text)
invitation list (userlist)
cost (double)
prepayment needed(bool)
max. reservations allowed (integer)
private

... and following features:

events are discussions so that they can be commented directly
if more than max reservations exist, you will be an attendee and set on the participant list as soon as there is a free place (first come, first serve)
creator can allow placeholder reservations so that you can bring in company
anybody can notify others about events
events could be private and then only notificated user are allowed to see and attend (so notification should be possible on creation time)
paypal integration, so that attendees could pay or donate to event creator
prepayment could be obligatory. users will stay attendees as long as event creator will accept (because they've checked they got the money) (legal issues?)
creator can kick and ban participants (also "de-notify" for private events)

accompanying PlugIn: "Fuzzy ToDo List"

Events should be connectable with todo lists. Imagine you want to meet some friends for a barbecue. You could set up date and time and specify what's needed: "Description count_needed count_provided provider"

Grill 1
- 1 myself
Sausages ?
- 10 myself
- 4 next_user
- 7 another_user
salads 2
- 2 someone
Beverages ?
- sixpack beer some_user
- 3 bottles soda and 3 bottles coke another_user
Music 1
- I'll bring my cool Ghettoblaster 8) poser

That's surely no useful todo list when you think of what a todo list should be used for normally, but it could help organizing events a lot! Features:

Could be attached to any event by discussion owner
Discussion owner could decide if anyone could add new topics, only participants or nobody
Same for topic fulfillments
Creator of topics could edit and delete their posts (discussion owner could admin them)
responses for topics are free text

Additional PlugIn: Places

When thinking of events it is very likely, that some event places will reoccur. Posting a new description of how to get there or any other interesting information to it will be exhausting. So it would be great to be able to define places. Some info may be added from time to time so a wiki would be best.
Fields are:

Name
Description
GeoLocation
Opening hours
Category (eg. Disco/Café/Lakeside)
Link to homepage

Only users who organized or participated on an event at a given location could edit the description.
New places can be created by anybody.

Event Plugin will could be extended to either accept freetext place input or a link to one defined place.

Conclusion

I'd really love to see something like this :-) I've planned to start by developing some small plugins and may be one time be good enough to code all this in one night. I think I should better take a more realistic approach and just start with this one.
There is no CMS or community script with such features (at least I haven't found something like this). I'll try my best with Garden and Vanilla.

My time is very limited these days and although programming is what I'd like to do most right now, it is also what I can spend the least time and it might take some time before I even start. So in order not to feel like working on a never ending project, I have decided to start in this order

first approach: events are just discussions with extra fields (one is date)
list discussion in event category by event-date per day, week, month
show events in monthly calendar in a module

If I ever manage that, I'll try the registering to events option...

I've set up a git repo and will post the link here as soon as I start to use it. As soon as it is usable I'll add it to the addons

P.S.: this is not a "I love my idea and now someone else should do the work for me!" thread. You can take it as an inspiration and realize a plugin like that if you want to and I will not be upset, but this is a plugin idea I have for a long time now, and in making it public, I hope I will feel a little pressure to start working on it.

hgtonight · July 2013

Good luck on your project!

I will pledge $10 for this plugin (even though it would be worth way more).

vrijvlinder · July 2013

wow that is an ambitious project , awesome !! RJ Here is me putting the pressure on ... Maybe there should be a competition . Put together a pot of cash and the one who gets it made first and best is the winner

I al ready have the horse I would bet on lol no offense RJ, but I think he is taking a leave from racing atm :P so you might be the only horse in the Race ! go get em!

R_J · July 2013

Finally started and it's already on github!

And starting showed me where I will have to cope with serious shortcommings. I can hook after SafeDiscussion but not before. So when the user creates an event, all error checkings have to be done on the clientside. But if data storage fails, I will not be able to give the user that feedback.
In fact, I've already thought of inserting my own event into vanillas class.postcontroller.php, but that would be my last way out...
I've decided to give my plugin all the functionality first and make it foolproof in the second last step.
The last step would be to style it and I was wondering about that yesterday: I've searched for two textboxes beneath of each other and only found something like this in a table. If I stick to the default theme, I'll get a html code like this (shortend)

    <label>Date</label>
    <div class="TextBoxWrapper">
      <input type="text" class="DateBox"/>
    </div>
    <label>Time</label>
    <div class="TextBoxWrapper">
      <input type="text" class="InputBox SmallInput"/>
    </div>

That's ugly. I'd have to wrap up each label+input in an extra div, enclose them in an additional div just to have them side by side. I'm not very experienced when it comes to html+css but it looks bloated :-/

But those problems are far away right now. There will be a lot more serious problems before I will seriously look for a solution for the above mentioned things.

@hgtonight: No. No money, please. Just tell me I've done a great job. Even if you have to lie :-D
Seriously: I suppose I will have a lot of questions and I'll need answers much more than money.

@vrijvlinder: seems like your horse is already speeding far away!
And yours is looking like this

while mine is not even half as "complete" like that

vrijvlinder · July 2013

lol I personally like your horse better that is way cool!

businessdad · July 2013

Groups, following, friends, events... It seems that many people would like Vanilla to become more like Facebook.

phreak · July 2013

@businessdad: Mmh... yeah looks like but its different. Organizational structures in communities are getting more and more important to users. They want to manage as most as possible where they digitally "live".

For example my users were asking for an app, are asking for groups (what would also help organize the user traffic once you have a lot), some love to meet in real (events), while following is not important yet... yet. I hope this will stay so.

vrijvlinder · July 2013

@businessdad: said: It seems that many people would like Vanilla to become more like Facebook.

No way, speak for yourself bambino, facebook sucks the more friends you have lol it is just an address book for me.... The amount of misinformation being traded is horrible, then there is the facebook censors ... No thanks

my hope is people will just make their own websites and forums and "social networking sites" will eventually disappear or dwindle into oblivion...