Event Calendar w/ Recurrence

3/10/2008 1:00:07 PM

Shaun3180

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First off, I've deployed 3-4 smallish university web sites using Mojo; it's the best open source .NET CMS I've found out there. As I've gone along, there's been a couple of instances where the option of having recurring events in the calendar would speed up the work of adding multiple, weekly events (like so many things, a nicety but not a necessity). In my case (there were a year's worth of events), I just decided to morph a different calendar with yours - http://www.aspcalendars.com/, albeit poorly, to get the job done quickly. Anyways, having some sort of recurrence pattern similar to this might be useful to others who are looking at using recurring events in their calendars.

THanks again Joe for your great work - Shaun

3/10/2008 1:14:34 PM

Joe Audette

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Re: Event Calendar w/ Recurrence

Hi Shaun,

Thanks for your kind words!

In my ongoing experiment to find a way to make a living working on mojoPortal, I've decided its time to build and sell a few premium features.

You'll be glad to know the first one I have in mind is an advanced events calendar.The primary extension I had in mind for it is to make it possible to sell tickets or registration for events, but I will also investigate adding the ability for events to span days. If you have any other wish list items related to the events feature, its a good time to mention them.

I'm within days of getting the exsiting e-comerce feature ready so I can open up a store on this site.

Then the advanced event feature is the first thing I'm going to build for sale. It will be reasonably priced and should be on sale within the next 3 months or so.

Cheers,

Joe

3/10/2008 3:27:33 PM

Shaun3180

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Re: Event Calendar w/ Recurrence

Sounds great - I look forward to this, especially the registration component of the system. I've developed a fair number of independent reg systems in the past, but haven't seen any good ones that come packaged as part of a CMS (at least in ASP/ASP.NET).

As far as features go, the only thing I can think of at this time (which you've probably already thought of) would be to allow administrators to post free events. Eg, let's say you have 2 events, the first being a free "teaser" to get people in the door and a second that will require people to pay to attend. It would be nice to allow portal members to sign up for both. That way, you would know how many people to expect at each event (maybe just to have an idea of many handouts or refreshments to prepare, or to keep records) irregardless of the event's cost (ie, registrations can be done without necessarily selling anything). Maybe it could be as simple as having a textbox for cost that, when set to 0, prompts the reg system to skip any payment components of the workflow and just sign the person up. Anyways, just my two cents - don't know how often this would be needed for an "e-commerce" system, but it's something I for one would find helpful, instead of just building a separate piece to handle registrations, like I've done in the past ...

Regards -Shaun

3/10/2008 9:05:13 PM

Todd Lewis

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Re: Event Calendar w/ Recurrence

Joe, I am glad to hear you are moving forward with opening a store and selling premium modules.

Do you plan to let others sell modules through your store or will it be only modules you write. We have completed a module that is in high demand for websites that we host that I too would like to sell it. We have other modules that we would consider releasing for free if your site would allow for $0.00 priced items.

I would expect you to take a percentage of the selling price for processing the transaction of course.

Thanks,
-Todd

3/10/2008 10:20:59 PM

Joe Audette

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Re: Event Calendar w/ Recurrence

Hey Todd,

Absolutely, I plan to open the store to others to sell things and if I can make a small percentage on other's products that would be great. If you have product(s) ready to sell it would be great otherwise my first product will be lonely as the only product in the store. :-)

I'm heading out of town for a few days of work up in NYC but lets plan to chat again sometime next week.

The store is very close now, I'll probably roll it out in test mode next week with some fake test products and using the PayPal sandbox and the Google Checkout sandbox.

Cheers,

Joe

4/11/2008 2:46:32 AM

redspider

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Re: Event Calendar w/ Recurrence

Hi Joe,

At this moment I am working on a new version of our website.
After trying to do the job with Rainbow Portal and other CMS systems I think MojoPortal is the best solution for us.

Using a ASP.NET CMS includes that I must rewrite my old classic ASP scripts to .NET (or is there a way to include a classic ASP script into the CMS without using an Iframe). As .Net newbie it will be a hell of a job :-)

Because it's a municipal webiste an eventcalendar is one of the most popular items on the site.
As wish list please find below some features that are a requirement for our eventcalendar:

- Search function
- Multiple categories
- Export to XML, txt, ... (on category level)
- Import from XML, txt, ...
- Rss feature
- Anonymous input form for citizens
- Validator function for Anonymous input
- 10 custom fields (price, start time, location, discount, ...)
- Next 10 upcomming events (for publication on the homepage)
- Today events
- Export to newsletter (weekly, monthly)
- Sent to friend function
- function to include trailers, pictures, ...

An example of our current module you can see at: http://www.tielt.be/nl/evenementen/events.asp
An example of our current an anonymous input form you can see at: http://www.tielt.be/nl/evenementen/add.asp

It's 6 year old site and in dutch so I now that it's not the best example, but with MojoPortal it only can get beter :-)

Greetings
Wouter

4/11/2008 7:05:38 AM

Joe Audette

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Re: Event Calendar w/ Recurrence

Thats quite a laundry list of features you need. If all those features are important I think the best plan for you is to purchase a 3rd party ASP.NET calendar component that has most of what you need and then wrap it in a custom feature you build to plug into mojoPortal.

There are quite a few elaborate commercial ASP.NET calendar and scheduling components out there, unfortunately no open source ones that I know of meet all your requirements.

I'm actually planning to build an enhanced Event Calendar very soon but it will not be free, it will be sold at a reasonable price as I need to come up with some revenue stream to keep mojoPortal efforts going. However, I don't think even my envisioned one has all that you need so probably one of the elaborate 3rd party ones is the way for you to go. The main feature I will be adding is ecommerce to sell tickets or registration for events. I do plan to add some features via these interesting open source projects:

DayPilot has both a commercial and an open source sheduling UI component. I'd say its the best open source one I know of but I think there are strong commercial contenders.

I also recently stumbled on Timeline.NET, which is derived from SIMILE, a javascript project from MIT. A very interesting UI for presenting events over time.

I plan to use both of these to enhance the mojoPortal events feature.

Best,

Joe

4/11/2008 7:23:52 AM

redspider

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Re: Event Calendar w/ Recurrence

Hi Joe,

I know it's a long list. :-)

It was not my intention to ask you to implement al those features, but it's just a list of possible features you can add if you want to.
I have no problem to buy some modules if the price is reasonable. So who knows we may buy your module in the future !

At the mean time I try to better understand C# and .Net and try to get my site up and running.

Greetz.

Wouter

6/10/2008 10:57:46 PM

MrKelly

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Re: Event Calendar w/ Recurrence

Hello Everyone,

I also think the event calendar is a good business tool. Another genre would be property rentals. In this case it would be necessary to be able to mark an event to span multiple days or months. I manage a site with some rentals so I am really interested in your new calendar Joe. I am new to ASP.Net, mostly with VS2005 and do not have the knowledge to do it myself. The idea of being able to put a rate in there would be great too.

Thanks much for the great work Joe, and also everyone who has contributed to this really great portal project!

KRM

7/14/2008 9:11:39 AM

kinzie

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Re: Event Calendar w/ Recurrence

One thing I'm surprised the Calendar doesn't have is a list view as well as the calendar view. Another feature that would be good is to be able to have this list view by category.

7/18/2008 3:12:14 PM

Joe Audette

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Re: Event Calendar w/ Recurrence

In the next few weeks my new Event Calendar Pro product will be available for sale on the soon to be opened mojoPortal store. The Event Calendar Pro feature is almost finished, just needs a few more tweaks and need to finish up the ecommerce part of it, but you can see what I have so far on the mojoportal demo site. It has friendly urls for the event detail page, list view month view, week view, day view, and timeline view. It also exposes the events as an rss feed. It supports recurring events. The one thing it doesn't do that I plan to implement as an upgrade is events that span multiple days don't render as a single event across days on the month view as I would like. Instead it renders like a recurring event, but I do have a plan for the implementation to render across days. Its going to be a bit of work to get it working so I'm saving that for an upgrade. It will support ticket sales in the first release.

Best,

Joe