PostCalendar 4.0 Features

PostCalendar 4.0 is packed with new improvements on previous releases and new features. The most important improvements in this version are performance and the correction of the repeating events. PostCalendar 4.0 now loads thousands of events in fractions of a second.

Now it works perfectly. Not only that, but you can now repeat events in a myriad of ways:

• Event repeats every day, week, month, year
• Event repeats every OTHER day, week, month, year
• Event repeats every SECOND day, week, month, year
• Event repeats every FOURTH day, week, month, year
• Event repeats the FIRST, SECOND, THIRD, FOURTH, FIFTH, or LAST (day or week) of every (month, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th month or year!

I know I’m not doing this function justice here because of the number of permietations, but seeing is believing. Just click “Add” or “Submit” an event and have a look at the Repeating section of that page. I don’t think Roger wanted to leave any other combinations out!

With the release of PostCalendar 4.0, the calendar is completely template driven. All the displays can be changed to your heart’s content. Not only that, but because we chose the Smarty template engine, a lot of logic actually resides in the template files so not only the look could be changed, but also the logic. Have a look at http://smarty.php.net for more information on the Smarty Template Engine.

So with PostCalendar 4.0 people can create “themes” or “skins” and share them! We would really appreciate it if you do create a template to share it with other PostCalendar users.

PostCalendar 4.0 features global, public and private calendars. Users can now share their calendars if they wish. This is a very exciting feature and it is important for us to understand how this works:

Global PostCalendar entries are viewable by all. This must be switched on in the PostCalendar settings. By default, users can only submit public or private events. Think of the Global arena as you are used to publish and view events in previous versions of PostCalendar where an admin or subadmin would enter an event themselves or approve an event before it is published.

Public PostCalendar entries are those PERSONAL events submitted by a user which are viewable by others by appending the user’s name at the end of the PostCalendar URL. For example, if you link to http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?module=PostCalendar&pc_username=mahmood you would see the PUBLIC events submitted by “mahmood”.

Private PostCalendar entries are those PERSONAL events which are viable by the person submitting the event only and are not viewable by anyone else. Just like the name says, the events are private.

The PostCalendar Block will show global events as well as the logged-in user’s public and private events.

Do remember, however, that in the PostNuke world, “Anonymous” is also a user! So if you link to http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?module=PostCalendar&pc_username=Anonymous you will see all the Public events submitted by the Anonymous users!

Events in PostCalendar can be “timed”, “all day”, “unended” and repeating events. The combination is practically endless and I think caters to every conceivable event type.

In PostCalendar you can view individual events, full day of events, week, month and annual listing of events. All of these views are configurable through the templates.

PostCalendar 4.0 sports unlimited user configurable categories. You’re no longer restricted to just 5. If you want a category for every country in the world, then be our guests and create those categories (and tell us about it, it should be interesting to view your calendar!)

Other than the categories, !PostCalendar also can “tie” events to specific PostNuke Topics. This is a configurable option.

PostCalendar uses the OverLib library so that you can list events with mouseover events (as in series 3.0x of PostCalendar) but the library has been upgraded to the latest version with 4.0. This again is a configurable option.

Event information is now complete and yes, both the email and website (if entered) are clickable. The event information now includes:

• Event Title
• Event Start Date
• Event Start Time
• Event Duration
• Event Description
• PostNuke Topic (if configured)
• Event Location including: Place, Street Address, City, State, Postal Code
• Event Contact information including: Contact name, phone, email, website and event fee

PostCalendar Search. The event Search has been completely overhauled as well, so that now you can search by various criteria. The plan for 4.0 should also include PostCalendar search integrated within PostNuke.

Pop-Up window: you can elect to view the events in a pop-up window, or in the main page (configurable option).

Multifunction block: the block can now be configured to show the mini month calendar, today’s events and future upcoming events as well as the ability to enable the “hover-text” feature of OverLib. All of these are configurable in the Blocks Administration.