Calendariffic 0.1.0

rubyonrails-talk
1

The Calendariffic plugin allows the user to create a DHTML pop-up calendar and an associated text-box that displays the selected date using 1 Rails function from within a .rhtml file.

Like all the other good calendar plugins, Calendariffic relies on the heavy-lifting performed by the Dynarch DHTML calendar (http:// www.Dynarch.com/projects/calendar/).

The Rails community needs another Ajax Calendar plugin like I need another hole in my head. Fortunately for all of us, my Colt .45 single-action Peacemaker just arrived from Ebay, complete with bullets. Okay okay, there were a handful of questionable reasons for building this plugin. 1. To see if I could do it. 2. I tried the Datetime Toolbocks plugin, which is beautiful and slick and does everything but perform surgery and it worked like a champ-- unless I wanted to modify its look and feel, in which case I needed a PhD in Ajaxology, which I don't have. 3. I tried another Calendar plugin which (in theory) possessed a configurable look and feel, but the documentation was so lacking that I (again) had to plumb the depths of someone else's ruby, rails and javascript and, well, I'm just a little too ADHD for that.

So Here's my Plugin Pledge.

* Calendariffic won't do as much as Datetime Toolbocks (e.g. you can't type in 'tomorrow' and have it guess the correct date), however it will do the basics just fine (i.e. pick a date from a calendar) and it'll still be easier to alter w/ respect to look and feel. * The documentation won't [completely] suck.

The Calendariffic Subversion repository is located here: http://opensvn.csie.org/calendariffic/calendariffic/

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Lemme know if you see any value in merging the helper methods over :slight_smile:

It's on my list, as well as in the interest of the author, to merge CalendarHelper into Datetime Toolbocks.

http://svn.toolbocks.com/datebocks_engine/trunk/app/helpers/calendar_helper.rb

Also, I am very interested to hear how you wanted to modify the interface but weren't able to (for whatever reason). I'd love to help make it simplier for you, or even provide some examples if it's already built in.

Nathaniel.

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Hey Nathaniel,

I would've preferred to use Toolbocks because of its slick parser and overall look, but I wanted to do the things shown below and I started altering the underlying javascript, but then decided I could just make something less slick, but which did precisely what I wanted.

I wanted to do a handful of things. 1. specify where the calendar icon is displayed relative to the text- box (i.e. before or after) 2. really mess with the css/look'n'feel of the text-box 3. change other attributes of the img and text elements (e.g. id) 4. put multiple calendar widgets on the same page and have them behave independently.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw something out there that other people might find helpful on occasion, and you can feel free to take (or leave) whatever you find in the plugin. it's my first plugin. I'm new to ruby/rails and programming in general, so go easy.

Best,

Paul