Calendar sprint wrap-up

Plone4Artists Calendar is my favorite calendaring product, but I'm often reluctant to recommend it due to some minor but nettlesome UI quirks. So, at the recent Plone Symposium sprint, we (Chrissy Wainwright, Kevin Harvey, Catherine Williams, Brian Hoffman, Eric Prescott, another Brian whose name escapes us, and I) put Plone4Artists Calendar up on the workbench in an effort to make it more usable out of the box.

Our first target was the 5 tabs that frame the main calendar view. Day, Week, and Month would show grid-style views for their respective periods, the List tab would show a month's worth of events in straight-down-the-page format, and Past would show (all?) the past events, again in list format. These tabs have been a common source of surprise to users, as they conflate duration with presentation style. Our new UI has only Day, Week, and Month tabs, following the conventions of most other calendar software. Calendar and list view are available in each of these via a pop-up menu that switches formats via JavaScript. We removed the Past tab altogether, as one can navigate to the past by clicking the left-hand arrow or by clicking the calendar icon to expose a pop-up calendar.

Our other effort was to localize the product's time and date display. Substantially written by our friends in Europe, Plone4Artist's formats were hard-coded to 24-hour time and day-month date ordering. We took a step toward obeying Plone's localization settings by fixing the former of these:

(We didn't realize until too late that Plone 3.2 introduced a time-only format string in portal_properties, so we spent quite a long time designing and implementing an heuristic to deduce a time-only format from the time-and-date format that was the only option in 3.1 and earlier. 3.1 people are welcome to send us beer or baked goods.)

Congratulations and thanks to all the sprinters! The calendar situation is a bit brighter, and we had a lot of fun brightening it.