Calendars, calendars, calendars…

Okay, I’ll admit it, I went for the easy solution. Normally I would simply love to use open source software to solve a problem if it’s at all practical. Note that I say practical and not possible. So far I haven’t found may problems there isn’t an open source solution for – keep in mind I’m talking about “hobby” computing here and not in medical claims processing and the sort of stuff I do at work.
WordPress right here is a good example.
So what’s the problem?
Calendars.
I had to install a calendar yesterday for that nameless org I do volunteer work for (it’s private so the link won’t be appearing here I’m afraid). I wanted to be able to get it working with WordPress, at least side by side and looking similar if not embedded.
I checked out all the plugins I could find first and none of them seemed robust enough to do the job without some backend SQL support. I don’t need much, but I do need repeating dates without having to enter them a dozen times for a given year. On the site I’m using static pages so it would be nice to have a calendar page. I don’t want it too “busy.”
To make a long story short I tried WebCalendar but, and it’s probably my fault, I couldn’t get the public access calendar to display our local time instead of that of the server. It did fine for my calendar, but not the public one. I can’t have everyone logging in, so that wasn’t a solution. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s possible, it just wasn’t happening in the time I needed it to happen.
Enter EasyPHPCalendar, a paid solution with locked down PHP scripts. I don’t mind paying for things and had this been open source, I’d have paid for it. I really don’t want to put the folks I’m dealing with looking like they’ve stolen anything.
So how did it turn out? Being completely honest here, EasyPHPCalendar did everything I wanted in short order. I had an internal WP page almost working last night with the demo version of EPC. I figure it won’t take too much more to get it going. However I stopped work on it when I got the paid version and put up a “real” calendar for my clients that works, looks like the rest of the site, and most importantly, is working NOW.
I’ll probably play with WebCalendar on this site soon enough and solve the problems I didn’t have time for yesterday, but in the meantime, my hat is off to EasyPHPCalendar.
Aloha!