What’s with the Different Calendars, Anyway

As you may have noticed, there are two different calendar functions on Gumnickopedia:

• Gumnick Family Calendar
• Upcoming Events

The first one uses a separate application called WebCalendar with its own system of user accounts. It has lots of options for different views (month, week, day), separate categories so you can look at a calendar for just birthdays, just events, etc. It also supports recurring events, which the other one doesn’t.

The second one uses a MediaWiki extension, so the events are more integrated with the rest of the site, and you can use all the same formatting features—fonts, colors, pictures, tables, etc. Each event is on its own page, and you can use the little calendar on Upcoming Events to get to monthly listings of events. But you can’t sort events into monthly listings of separate categories, and you can’t set up recurring events; after a birthday passes, for instance, you have to revise the page to make it show up again next year, and again the year after that, and so on.

Both systems have their pros and cons, so I thought we could experiment for a while to see which calendar works better for our needs (or whether neither one does).

To add an item to the little calendar and list of upcoming events on the Upcoming Events page, you have to make a page for the event, and then format the page using the {{Event}} template. The formatting for a sample event, Beth’s birthday, looks like this:

{{Event|
|longdate=November 11
|month=11
|day=11
|year=2006
|description=Number 36!
|alphabetize=Beth
}}
[[Category:Beth]]

Once you plug in the variables, the {{Event}} template takes care of categorizing the event into the category “Events” and also into a a specially named category for the date to which the event belongs—in this case, a category called “2006/11/11.” Feel free to copy this code and try setting up some events, and then give me your feedback on whether this is a useful way to manage calendar items.

I’ve been playing around with different ideas about where to stick the calendar, so if you keep coming back and seeing calendars in different spots, bear with me, and give me your feedback about the various possibilities.