Episode: 63
Title: HPR0063: WebCalendar
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0063/hpr0063.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:54:00

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Welcome to another episode of HPR. I am your host Enigma, and today I'll be talking about
Web Calendar. Web Calendar is a PHP-based calendar application that can be configured as a single
user calendar, a multi-user calendar, or an event calendar that is viewable by visitors.
Web Calendar has a ODBC backend that stores all of the events users in a database. You
can set it up to use MySQL, PostgresSQL, Oracle DB2, Interbase, MSSQL Server, or pretty much
any other ODBC compliant database. Web Calendar has multi-lingual support. It supports up to
30 languages which are on its site. I'll have a link to its site in the show notes. The calendar
server can be viewed with any I calendar compliant calendar application, such as Mozilla Sunbird,
Apple ICal, or Nome Evolution, or any RSS-enabled application like Firefox, Thunderbird, RSSL,
FeedDemon, or Blog Express. It has built-in RSS feeds, which I am currently playing with on our
hacker events.org that's powered by Web Calendar. That's the site that I have the most
experience with this application, and if you go check that out, you'll see the practical
application for this package. The one thing that I don't like about this app is that the
style sheets aren't the most pretty. Let's put it that way. I'm still playing with it. I don't
like the style sheets that are available, and I can't find any skins for it. If anyone's good
in CSS, please email me. I've got a few projects that I just don't have the artistic talent for,
and could use some guidance. Some features that I do like, it has you can view the calendars
basically their day, week, month, or year, just like any other calendar application. Really nothing
special there. You can view others calendars. You can view someone else's calendar on top of
your calendar, so you can compare events. You can add edit and delete users, add edit and delete
events. Repeat events like, for example, we have our bin rev meetings scheduled every third
Friday of every month. We have, and you can put in a description, the website and just a little
description of what the event is. You have a configurable custom event fields, user configurable
preferences for colors. You also have a default color scheme that I've been playing with. You can check for
scheduling conflicts like Outlook does with its calendar. You have email notifications for new updated
deleted events. You have RSS for update and new updated and deleted events and also unapproved events. If
you have a calendar that supports anonymous adding of events, you can import events from I calendar,
V calendar, or Palm. You have an optional general access, which is no login required to allow
calendar to be viewed with people without a login, like hacker events has, so anybody can view the
calendar. Also, you can publish free busy schedules to all users, kind of like Outlook does. The RSS
supports that puts a user's calendar into RSS. Again, I haven't played with the RSS feeds enough
yet to know how well they work. I have a test site that I'm playing with at the moment before I
actually drag it over to hacker events. You can subscribe to remote calendars, hosted elsewhere,
and then either on I calendar or each calendar formats, and then the user authentication is web-based
HTTP, LDAP, or NIS. A nice part of the package is it has an add-on that has a capture in it. Back in
late last year, we were having a lot of trouble with a spam on the site who gets, I had like 15,000
spam messages within a month or two. It was just absolutely insane. You can also implement a
capture on the site that will limit your spam. Also, one thing I don't like about the site is there
is no select all for the unapproved events. Basically, you have to delete them one by one or go
and go behind the scenes and go into the database and delete them out of the database table, which is what we
ended up doing. If anyone has any questions, comments about this package, please email me. Again,
if anyone has any experience with CSS and wants to help out on a couple projects, please email me. Also,
if anyone wants to do a show or be a part of this hacker-public radio thing, we've got going on,
email me at admin at hacker-publicradio.org. We will set you up with whatever you need to make that
happen, as well as give you some show ideas, things like that. That's it for today. I'm
Enigma again and have a nice day.