Geeklog Forums

I admit, I haven't looked into this for feasibility, but...

I, and I'm sure many other users of GL, don't use the calendar. I don't see it as an integral part of a CMS and think it should be an optional plugin - it just adds to bloat.

Comments/flames/"You're an idiot" welcome.

- Andy

I agree completely but then again I am an idiot. The way it is now the Calendar is too hard to turn of for new GL sites.

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Yes I am mental.

Watch this space

Hmm, is it?

• remove link from menu
  
• disable Upcoming Events block
  
• disable personal calendars (in config.php)
  
• remove calendar.php and calendar_event.php
  
• remove events option from search

That should be it. Or am I missing something?

bye, Dirk

Ah, great! Thanks Dirk.

Big thanks to Michael Askew!

Dirk - are you planning to incorporate his changes when they're done?

As I said in another thread: With all the enhancements that have been promised before but never happened, I'm going to wait until I see it.

I'd also be interested in how he's going to address the problem of URL changes that this will no doubt cause. I do actually run a site where the calendar plays an important role and I don't want to break any existing (external) links to that calendar ...

bye, Dirk

All I am saying is if people are having trouble installing GL (and they obviously are) in the first place they are going to have a hard time removing the calendar.

Try to search this site as a newbie and try to find out how to remove it. You might search for "removing calendar" and you will get this Try searching the forums (which is already weird since there is two search boxes right next to each other on the pages) and you get nothing. Then you ask on the forum and you get told off for not finding out the answer yourself.

It could just be much easier is all I am trying to say, sorry if I offended you.

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Yes I am mental.

It sure could, but then again I haven't seen a lot of requests to get rid of the calendar. I guess even if you don't use it, you can always simply leave it as is and basically just ignore it.


Not at all. It was an honest question.

bye, Dirk

I am in the progress of tuning everything into a plugin in GL becuse i have to. I have almost finished the links and polls plugins and I also am working on turning the calander into a plugin. I am doing this with the 1.3.11 codebase. once i have these done im gona do the same with the stories/topics stuff and call it the news plugin which i will ada some CNN.com like functionality to0. All the plugins will have their settings stored in the database so that they can be configured from the web.

This is for a hosting company so things like this are sorta requiered. If GL worked this way it would make it much easier to keep useing geeklog releases instead of haveing to fork my stuff into something compleatly diferent. It would also make the cential code base much more lean and less complex.

I am adding suport for some better cross plugin comunication so plugins can intergrate into each other some what. as well as cleaning up the current plugin API. I am also adding support for multiple websites under the same code base so you dont have to use seperate tables per site. this will be achived by flaging each row by site that it is asociated with and selecting site based on host name in the url.

Dirk if you want any of this when im finished just let me know.


Trinity

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glFusion - Technology Fused with Style - www.gllabs.org

That's true - it's what I do now. I just think that having a leaner 'core' is a good objective - easier to maintain, easier to modify if you need to do custom things, and more efficient. I guess I just don't like having functionality in the core that don't really belong there. The calendar seemed like a good first target...

As for the external link issue you mentioned, couldn't we do some fancy URL rewriting to make that work?

- Andy

And, as often asked, the calendar should also have an events list...I'm running a portal now where I'm just submitting events as stories in the topic 'Events'. Much more effective and saves me a lot of work since submitting/editing is easier, and i can add an image.

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Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

speaking of calendars, what happened to this project?

ajay

ps: pls pardon the digression

I was apparently going to slowly for someone, and they decided to "dedicate lots of resources" to making an improved calendar happen. Since I had lots of other stuff to do in 1.3.x and GL2 and I wasn't receiving any assistance beyond people saying "I'll chip in", I decided not to duplicate effort and stopped work on the calendar. It looks like the other calendar project got dropped as well, so that is why we still only have the "legacy" calendar. *sigh*

-Vinny

sounds great. actually a large portion of the feature requests could be resolved like this. Many options of plugins are not implemented well in the links & polls.

Are you planning on publishing those? I am sure many people would be vary happy, inlcuding me :-)

Actually I would like to see geeklog become 'thinner".
Now some internal functions of geeklog start to become outsourced, they can be removed from the core. plugins like the PHPBackup go beyond the capabilities of the internal functions, and I am sure once trinity starts to release what she is doing (if she does :-)), geeklog could become more powerful by splitting smaller functions into plugins.

Vinny, thanks for the update on the project, I can empathize.

As to the main discussion, if there is no criterion to decide whether something should be a plugin or a core function, perhaps just the fluctuation in its use would be a good metric? Just from reading this thread, it seems like roughly half of us use the calendar and the other half are not sensitive to its presence.

I guess it is finally upto the main developers to decide the feasibility of whether the calendar should remain a core function or move over to a plugin. Perhaps the potntial impact of such a move in terms of keeping up with the mission statement or and increasing usability are factors to think of. Admins, does this sound like something worthy of a POLL?

Personally , I feel GL has come a long way from what the main page says: "Geeklog is a 'blog', otherwise known as a Weblog." Other webmasters I have talked to compare it more with other CMSs than blogs. With that in mind, I think what Andy has suggested and trinity is already doing is a step in the right direction. From a (rather myopic) reductionist's view, perhaps the core of GL is its security philosophy and how it is executed, while everything else is essentially "plugged in" to that philosophy (this is the one thing that has kept me from switching from geeklog or linux). While we see other CMS solutions get bulkier and slower, if we could make ours leaner and more modular, we stand a great advantage both in terms of efficiency, scalability and user ability.

Maybe all I said has already been figured in for GL2?

Now to the topic of the state of current "Legacy" calendar. When a calendar is indeed being used on a site, i have had three kinds of demands from people. a) None - from people who dont mind surfing to a site to keep themselves up to date, b) Can't you just e-mail me? - from people who barely get time to go through their e-mails and c) Can I import it to my PDA or Outlook? - yeah the gadget happy ones. So I have been looking for something that can keep all three types atleast a bit happy. In this regard, I was wondering how practical it would be for an inexperienced person like me to adapt something already out there like the piCal(which does a bit of everything) to GL as compared to modifying the current one?

Thanks for reading this far,

ajay

I have to take a week or 2 off from working on this because im in the middle of writeing a bunch of mantainance contracts but i would like to pint out that there are lots of ideas to be seen in in CMS projects out there like Mambo and others that could be used in GL. If Mambo's admin interface wasnt so god dam confusing it would have geeklog beat hands down in the way it handles plugins and layout. prehaps i will take some of these ideas and make core work like it does ( minus the cruft that is). by the way the theme interface can be conciderably lessend by doing away with start and end functions like COM_StartBlock and COM_EndBlock if you just used a unified COM_createBlock with the content going into the argument the entirety of the block template can go in one file witch makes it easer to edit when createing new themes or porting themes from other CMS or current static page based web sites. I plan on seeing if i can impiment something like this though it would break a lot of plugins but the changes to current plugins to do this would be quite simple in that you replace all instances of these function calls with the unified one. Most code looks like this anyways



If you change it so $display becomes a argument to a single function that calls a single template you have just made the template file for a block one file witch makes it easer to edit in a HTML editor eather on your machine or in a javascript HTML editor on a web page. this can also be used for COM_startpage and COM_endpage. wouldnt it be nice to just have to edit one HTML file to change page layout?

BEGIN RANT
Those of you who place the COM_startpage at the top of the page and use ECHO all though the page, did you relize that doing that slows down the execution of the page by quite a bit. If you dump all output into a string and echo it once, you save quite a lot overhead. i have even seen plugins and hacks that use even slower ways to output but thats a rant for another post hehe. But sufice to say instituteing my method would have the side effect of forceing lazy programers to speed up there code

END RANT

My current status with what i have done

Polls and Links turned into plugins
Polls does not have comment funtionality yet (still trying to wrap my head around it)
Links and Polls plugins do not uninstall as of yet (I just have to fix the unistall functions)
Removed all code in geeklog that does Polls and Links stuff that it built in
Documenting plugin interface for others use in a more detailed way and asist in seeing what is lacking (20% done)
I have begun turning Calendar into plugin (about 50% done)
begin study of News(blog) code for as to how to convert to plugin
began moveing settings for Polls and Links from config.php to a database table that is installed when plugin is installed.


As you can see there is a lot going on. See you guys in two weeks

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glFusion - Technology Fused with Style - www.gllabs.org

Interesting. I didn't even know that this topic was here when I opened my feature request. I did check the other feature requests for duplicates though.

Trinity, if you beat me to it feel free to post your patches/contributions to the feature request page.

ok back on the job (somewhat) in my work on this. vinny and dirk if your folowing this do you have any ideas on how to merge all of this into geeklog proper (its a whole lot of changes). should i jus drop you a tarball of my install and database or perhaps i can take a dif of changes from 1.3.11 to present in cvs and merge what you have added seince then?

I know it will be a while till i get done with this but i figure i should start asking these questions now. perhaps once we get things synced up i can add stuff directly to cvs for further improvements after the fact. Core will be a lot leaner after this is done. so it should be easier to maintain afterwards

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glFusion - Technology Fused with Style - www.gllabs.org

Diffs against CVS would be much appreciated. Thanks!

bye, Dirk

just sent dirk a diff for links plugin for cvs version of geeklog so its moveing along

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glFusion - Technology Fused with Style - www.gllabs.org