#900 To show some significant dates

[Christophe B.]

I'd like to see some religious dates, such as Easter, added to formatted date on charts and lists :
English: Sun 18 April 1976 [Easter]
French : Dim 18 Avril 1976 [Pâques]

Some Christian dates :
- easter (there is a formula to calculate easter date each year)
- ascension (easter+39)
- pentecost (easter+49)
- assumption (Aug 15)
- all_saints (Nov 1st)
- christmas (Dec 25)

Should be optional (Gedcom or user option ?)
To add also to calendar ?

[Christophe B.]

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Christian dates added to 4.1.4
SVN 2379

[Gerry Kroll]

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As discussed in the Developer forum:

1. There should be a GEDCOM configuration option to optionally show religious dates.

2. We need to separately configure the display of religious dates for many different faiths.

3. This feature should not be turned on until we can agree on which faiths should have displayable religious dates.

4. (not mentioned in the discussion) Perhaps this feature should be a module, since it's not essential to the proper functioning of PhpGedView. We need a clean way of calculating the dates for various faiths that we plan to support, and the method should be easily extendable to other faiths.

A final word of caution: The fundamental (radical) Muslims will view this feature as another "insult to Islam" if we don't implement important dates in Islam at the same time we implement them for Christianity and Judaism. How do we determine which dates are important?

<soapbox> I find it very odd that the fundamental Muslims are so intolerant where their holy book definitely preaches tolerance. </soapbox>

[Greg Roach]

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I've renamed the title of this request, to make it less contentious and reflect wider possible uses;

Independence/national days.
Summer/winter solstices.
Saint's days.
The 366 individual day names of the French republican calendar.
etc.

We use the same date formatting code for dates in many different contexts. While some might be suitable having info apended, some do not. In many contexts, there probably isn't enough room on the screen. Possible candidates might include:

The individual page - similar to where we display the age at event
The title of the daily calendar page.
Each box of the monthly calendar page.
On the welcome block.

Any others?

For this reason, I don't think this function should be part of the date class. In terms of implementation, we probably want a standalone function that takes a Julian Day number and an array of categories, and returns an array of day names. i.e. you call

significant_days($jd, array('christian', 'jewish', 'national-holidays'))

and you get data of the form:

array('Third Sunday After Pentecost', 'Labour Day', 'St Bartholemews day')

Another option might be a third parameter to specify a location, so a French user could get french national holidays, an American user could get american ones, etc. Not sure on this yet.

This function wouldn't actually do any calculations - it would delegate that to optional modules, allowing ease of expansion, etc.

[Łukasz Wileński]

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I added christian dates, Polish national days and name-days on my PGV site. I implemented this in today block and calendar.

[Thomas52]

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The 'historical events' option recently added to the patches section can easily be changed to 'religious holidays' or any other title you wish, and whatever dates or events you desire can be added.