Thread

I’m converting our existing synagogue website to EE. We have a purpose-built event calendar system I wrote in PHP a few years ago. I am designing a weblog replacement for the calendar but could use some advice on a few things:

1. Each event in the current system has a date, a start and end time, and also a booking start and endtime. We don’t need to handle multi-day events. Right now I use MySQL DATE and TIME types, which is exactly what I want. Various PHP functions allow me to accept fairly free-form input.

To replicate this, I could use the existing EE Date custom field type, but I’d have to do some fiddling with the entries in a SAEF (parse them, merge the date into the time fields, etc.) I might be able to some of this in Javascript, but it’s probably more easily done in PHP after the SAEF submits. But I don’t see how I can get a hook into the SAEF mechanism to do this. Am I missing something?

I could write an extension for DateOnly and Time custom field types. But that seems like overkill.

2. Our current calendar admin page has a multi-field form on top for entering new events and editing existing ones. Below, a couple of months of events are shown in tabular form, with buttons to edit, clone, or delete each event.

To recode something similar, I need the SAEF, and also probably Solspace’s Form Helper Plugin. I think I can more or less recreate what I have, but I’m not sure it’s possible.

Instead, I thought I might preserve most of my current PHP code, but have it do its database operations to the weblog rather than to my old table.

I could use raw SQL on the exp_ tables to do that. However, I’d prefer some kind of weblog API. A weblog is a pretty good analog of a database table (maybe it actually was a table, once upon a time), An API that provided that abstraction, hiding the details of the actual EE tables, sounds useful. Has anyone built such a thing, or am I missing a current feature?

(An aside: each time I think I have hit a wall in terms of possible functionality, I keep discovering ways out, like custom field extensions or the Solspace plugin. There is a lot of depth to EE, but it does take lot of forum diving to find it.)

Thanks a lot,
Dan

Heh- yep, the pool gets very deep once you start diving in it!

Hm- just throwing it out in case you haven’t seen it before- Repeet plugin- a riff on the EE calendar with the main addition being spanning the event date.  Which I know you said you don’t need, but throwing it out as an example.

Otherwise- it’s too complex for me to give a solid answer.  The SAEF code has a number of hooks in there- just search modules/weblog/mod.weblog_standalone.php for the word ‘hook’- and see extensions docs if you haven’t already.  I suspect you could do what you need to pretty easily there.

Not sure what you mean by a weblog api- well, I think I get the idea, but haven’t seen what you’re talking about.  One of the importers would likely come closes- but none would really be an api.

A belated thanks for the reply. I did take a closer look at some other addons, and I believe I can modify the Blind Date extension to do a little date/time merging from one field to another, which should solve my requirements. Or I can use the hook you pointed out, though Blind Date gets me some other functionality I need as well.

Dan

More blathering, but I found this quite wonderful list of Javascript date and time pickers: 16 Cool Date and Time pickers. Googling will get you more, but these seem to be the cream of the crop.

By the way—this date picker is reeeealy good.

http://www.frequency-decoder.com/2006/10/02/unobtrusive-date-picker-widgit-update/

It’s quite thoughtfully designed, flexible, and uses modern code.