MODx | Kalender Enhanced | 0.1

My partner Greg and I have been playing around in our MODx sandbox installation this morning with Kalender Enhanced, a calendar plugin for MODx.  We looked at like 2 different installations of other Calendar systems and came to the conclusion that this is our favorite.  The only drawbacks I had really with this one on the front end without digging around is how the end user is going to interact with the calendar.  Calendar entries have two “tv’s” start date and end date.  On the first go around I totally missed how this worked and couldn’t figure out why my entries weren’t showing up.  The other drawback I had was initially I couldn’t figure out where to drop the entries until I figured out the folder thing below the text editor.  These are two very minor things that I am pretty sure I can get my mind around and we can simplify for our client.

Here’s a little information about the Kalendar Plugin from the MODx Repository:

As the title implies, I took the fantastic Kalender snippet by Danny van Ommen and Wim Beerens and did quite a bit of enhancement. The calendar now displays in a wide format (870px; can be changed), with large cells for each day of the month. Events that take place on each day are listed in summary form. Floating your mouse over each event brings up a more detailed summary. Each event links to the corresponding document that represents that event.

The original Kalendar used the pub_date and unpub_date to mark the date and time of each event. This is problematic, however, if you want to view the actual event page before or after the event has taken place, because MODx will force the document to be unpublished. Kalendar Enhanced uses two custom TVs, ‘StartTime’ and ‘EndTime’. This way, you can mark your event time without effecting its published status, allow the links in the calendar to lead to active pages.
Works very much like Easy PHP Calendar’s “Text on Calendar” mode. Very powerful for simple scheduling.

There is currently an active instance of this snippet running on my photography site that you can view as a demo. There isn’t a whole lot on it right now, but if you jump around to the different months, especially December 2007, you’ll see at least one event December 1st. 🙂

MODx Content Management System | Kalender Enhanced | 0.1