Testing new calendar sites

[arclight]

I've been working with Orf to find a new calendar application that will make it easy to list and find all the things we do. With mad props to my Level 1 homie (and coworker) Matt Vance, I present two proof-of-concept calendar apps:

vCalendar (http://c2.dev.austinimprov.com/index.php)

This one's free and kind of limited but it gets the job done.

Thyme (http://c3.dev.austinimprov.com/index.php)

This one costs $50 but has a lot of cool features.

Let me know and I'll set you up with an account (you can still read the events if you don't have an account to add events.)

[arthursimone]

thyme. nice.

color coding to easily distinguish between classes and shows and workshops very very desirable!

nice is nice

[Roy Janik]

I like Thyme. If it can really import/export iCal calendars, then it'll be a snap to sync with a Google Calendar for those of us who like such things.

[arclight]

Yeah, I color-coded the event categories and added tiny icons to differentiate them. All that is configurable; if the colors are manky, it's because I picked them mostly at random.

One of the many cool things about Thyme is that it remembers locations (after an hour of putting sample data in vCalendar I got really damn tired of retyping "617 Congress Ave." and "4803 Airport Blvd.") The Google Maps link is a really nice touch too.

Also, it integrates with the forums so you can use your forum login to get into Thyme. I've set up the usual suspects as schedulers; otherwise people should be able to submit events and have them edited and posted by one of the schedulers.

I'm looking at eventful.com too, but I think it'd be really cool if Thyme could export to Eventful; I'll check the Thyme forums for info on that. Worse comes to worse though, if we could muster some programming talent and build the Thyme/Eventful integration, we could probably trade that code back to the original authors for a free license to the software. Not as cool as totally open code, but cool nonetheless.

[arclight]

Heh. I got the Javascript calendar export thingy working. See http://promo.austinimprov.com/sample_js_calendar.html for an example of slurping the current events into an existing page with Javascript. The upshot is that anyone with a website can promote events on their site by including a tiny bit of CSS & Javascript on their pages. As long as the main calendar is updated regularly, we can post current events in a lot of places. I still need to sort out how troupes can promote their own events from the central calendar. It can be done, but it may take a little work to make it easy.

[valetoile]

I like thyme! also, the list thing is very nice too. Though I would cut down on the text a little and let the links give a more in-depth description of shows.
Awesome!

[acrouch]

Is that a one-time fee of $50?

[arclight]

The $50 is for use for a single website which I take to mean 'calendar.austinimprov.com'; this doesn't stop us from exporting the data and displaying it elsewhere (there are Javascript/CSS widgets that let you put a calendar on any page, plus RSS feeds & iCal export.) It's $200 for a server license which would let us run multiple installations on the same machine; still affordable but not necessary for what we're trying to do.

My guess is that they'd probably charge us an upgrade fee smaller than $50 if they make a major version change, and I expect minor updates are free.

Check out their page at http://www.extrosoft.com/

The next trick is to show event listings by venue...