Re: [PHPiCalendar-DEV] Emailing events proof of concept

[blaine <la...@us...>]

On Sunday, Dec 1, 2002, at 15:40 America/Vancouver, Chad wrote:

> Hover events are cute but of no real practical use(IMHO). No one knows 
> or expects them to be there and they can really drag in slow browsers. 
> This could make for a nifty Mod though.

Perhaps for version 1.0 or 1.1 some sort of squirrelmail-like plugin 
system (in conjunction with templates) could make it very easy to add 
this sort of thing. Just a little hook, and you can do all sorts of 
fancy things.

> My idea for 'Email this event' was this:
> A field and email button at the bottom of the todo or event popups. 
> The email mechanism you've built looks like  its working pretty well, 
> you could simply move all the code to an 'email.inc.php' file that we 
> can include anyplace. Bill your emails look nice, just needs a coat of 
> paint which I can do if needed.

One feature I'd really like to see along with this would be support for 
periodic emails; it would require cron, of course, but it would be 
great to be able to send calendar updates at regular intervals, so that 
people don't need to go to the website (or subscribe to an rss feed) to 
get calendars.

Something to go along with this (and the RSS feeds) is recently added 
or changed events. This could be done with the Last-Modified and 
Created property, in conjunction with Sequence. As I envision it (and 
this might not be to spec, but the rfc isn't very clear on this point), 
sequence would only be incremented for significant changes to the 
event; that way, people wouldn't be notified if a spelling mistake was 
fixed, etc. The RSS feed could be called with a "new events since..." 
parameter, with the default set in config.inc.php. Likewise, the email 
cron script could be given a similar argument.

With these features, system-hosted calendars would become useful for 
the many people that just subscribe to various mailing lists, rather 
than just web-addicted fiends or people with mozilla or ical. I'm so 
excited about what's happening with php icalendar. ;-)

If no-one puts a thumbs down to the above ideas, or takes them on, I'll 
start work on them sometime around the 15th.

b.