As the Star Trek computer used to say to Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk, “Working….” (rattles and clicks and such in the background). I’ve been working on a self-imposed project called “My Family Calendar”. If you’ve read my blog for a long time, you know that I’m not happy with Datenator, the calendar program I’m using. While it’s fairly easy to administer, it only supports regular-interval recurring events (won’t do recurring holidays like Memorial Day - the last Monday in May every year) which is a HUGE thing for me. I’d like to set it and forget it. Plus, it doesn’t include a number of other things I’d like to do. I can’t show you my on-line calendar because it’s password protected so only my family members have access.

I’ve looked at a lot of web-based calendars: WebCalendar, myPHPCalendar, phpWebCalendar, Calendarix, and a slew of others. I’ve even thought about importing my Google Calendar. The ones that do what I want also include features I don’t want like group scheduling, multiple individual calendars, to-do lists, tasks, etc. There are also those that are hard to administer and have a busy screen - too much information at once.

So after going through all of these, I’ve decided to write my own. I’m going to borrow heavily from other calendars. No sense in re-inventing the wheel, right? But what I really want to create is an address book with a calendar interface to help me with family birthdays and anniversaries. Basically here’s how I want it to work:

• It will only display a month view for the calendar.
• ONLY birthdays, anniversaries and holidays will be displayed. Because of this, all events are assumed to last all day, so no hour:minute data will be kept.
• It will allow you to click on an event (birthday, anniversary, holiday) and pop up a window with information on that event.
• The popup will contain contact information: mailing address, email, web page.
• The popup will contain a photo of the person(s).
• The popup will contain the date, but not the year.
• The popup can be printed.
• There will be an admin panel with the following functions:
  • Manage (add/modify/delete) events.
  • Set the admin password.
  • A holiday interface with checkboxes so the admin selects what holidays are displayed.
• Login and Logout of the admin panel.

Once I get these items “perfected” I’ll start adding on my wish list:

• Ability to create a PDF of the displayed month’s calendar that any user can print.
• Ability to automatically send a congratulatory email to the person(s) celebrating their birthday/anniversary, provided they have an email address in the system.
• Ability to send an email that will create a post in WordPress.
• Ability to control these items through the admin panel