15 Mar 09 Event Calendar: Everything But Repeating Events
Continuing along with the Google calendar integration, I built views to allow users to edit and delete the events they have previously submitted. These actions are simply requests; the admin still has to approve them. In the PHP version, these updates did not require admin approval. Here, they do, because the admin must supply the Google password to synchronize the events on the Google calendar. So the events simply get marked as “edit request” or “delete request”, which the admin must approve by toggling the status to “edit approved” or “delete approved”. The admin then visits the custom Google sync view, supplies the password, and the events are synchronized with Google via the gdata API. This seems to be working out well, although I’m not entirely happy with the workflow in the admin area to accomplish all this. Right now I have to visit the model change list, approve changes, then go to the custom Google sync view. We’ll see how this works out in practice.
I was very pleasantly surpised at how easy it was to add a link to my custom Google sync view in the admin area. I decided I wanted this link visible on all model views in the admin area (there is only one model right now: the event). I simply had to create this path in one of my template directories: admin/gcalendar/change_list.html (where gcalendar is the name of my application). Django will look to see if I have provided a change_list.html, and will use it in preference to the default one. And I didn’t even have to copy the whole template, I only needed to use template inheritance to override the block that provides the “object tools”. My change_list.html looks like this:
{% extends "admin/change_list.html" %}
{% block object-tools %}
{% if has_add_permission %}
<ul class="object-tools"><li><a href="add/{% if is_popup %}?_popup=1{% endif %}" class="addlink">Add {{ name }}</a></li>
<li><a href="google_sync/">Google Sync</a></li>
</ul>
{% endif %}
{% endblock %}
I just added the <li> and link to my “Google Sync” page. Here is a screen shot of my calendar event change list that shows this link in action. Check the upper right, next to the “Add” link. It was nice to see it was automatically styled to fit in with the rest of the admin.
Clicking on the link leads one to the custom admin view. Here, the list of approved events appears. The admin types in the Google password, and the view synchronizes (adds, updates, deletes) the events with Google. It might be a minor pain to enter your Google password every time, but I’d rather not hard-code or store the admin’s Google password in the database.
I think using Google calendar is going to be cool. I like the fact that people can add the events to their own calendars, invite other people, and set email or SMS text message reminders for these events. I also like that other people can embed the site calendar on their own websites or blogs to spread the word.
With that in place, all I have left to do is to support repeating events. And actually, as it stands right now, I can also handle multi-day events. This covers 99% of the events on SurfGuitar101.com already. There are only two weekly gigs on the calendar right now. I have worked on this off and on for 3 or 4 weeks now, and have replicated most of the PHP version’s functionality by leveraging Google and Django. It took me about 3 or 4 months before I had this much working when I initially developed the PHP-Nuke version.
Repeating events might be difficult, because the gdata API sort of punts on them. In order to specify a repeating event, I have to format a fairly complex string according to some iCalendar RFC. Yikes. I will now poke around and see if there are some Python libraries available that I could use for this, or perhaps it isn’t as bad as I think it is and I can do it by hand. Or perhaps I will leave repeating events for the future since they aren’t used that much. I am itching to get what I have created so far deployed so I can start beta-testing and getting feedback from users.
