[Imc-uk-features] [Imc-uk-process] calendar pre-live preparation

[yossarian]

Hi Genny, thanks very much for all the feedback!  I've been getting
feedback on it from Wietse and LordRich as well and have tried to act on
their suggestions.  I'll let you know the status of each of these things
in my response below and enter all your suggestions into the
feature-request system (available at
http://escapegoat.org/projects/imcalendar ). 



Genny wrote:
> feedback on new calendar...
>
> looks good to me.
>
> things that i came across while posting.
>
> Tags - I didn't know how to create a two-word tag.  On flickr, you
> enclose tag in inverted commas and it appears as two - or more - words
> in a single tag.  I tried the same and I think it's appeared as two
> tags one beginning with ", the other ending with ".  If this can be
> done, it would need a few words of explanation on the publish form.

I wasn't sure which way to go with the tags.  The
http://history.indymedia.org.uk site uses comma separated tags, the
trouble with those being that if somebody forgets to put commas between
the tags we end up with a whole lot of
really_big_long_tags_that_screw_up_the_layout.  I will look into doing
it the Flickr way, seems like a good idea.


>
> Are the tags going to appear anywhere else apart from the front page
> of the calendar?  I wanted them when I was on another page and
> couldn't work out how to get them back again.  maybe a link to tags
> somewhere on each page?

Which pages would you like them on?  I guess one way to go would be to
have a "show tags" link which would just reveal the tags within the page
any time they were wanted, without reloading the page, would this be
useful do you think?


>
> Links - would be useful to be able to put in two links when publishing
> an event, one to a relevant indymedia article, the other to
> information about the event on external website maybe.  Will it use
> relative or absolute links for other indymedia articles?

The user interface needs a better explanation (and better layout!).  You
can actually add as many links as you want, by pressing "Add link" for
however many links you want.  It works pretty well, the trouble is that
most websites don't work this way and people aren't used to that.  I can
put a little explanation beside the "Add link" button (and the ones for
videos, photo, and file uploads, which all work the same way).


>
> Calendar view - those little arrows in calendar view could do with
> text on hover to explain where they're taking you: next/last month or
> year. Being slow, I took a while to work it out!


Yeah, this is mostly related to the fact that I suck at design and CSS. 
I have basically just stolen the UK site templates and shoved my own
application into them, but there's nothing really in the templates for
"next month", "previous month" etc.  I can try and mess with this, but
it'd really be better to just get somebody who's decent at graphical
stuff to go over the whole site, because there will be lots of instances
where it can be improved in the same way.

>
>
> View options - guess this might be in hand - but it would be helpful
> to have the current view mode (calendar, month, week, day) indicated
> by a highlight / different colour or something.

Cool, I can do that.


>
> Month list - doesn't appear to be in date order yet but I'm sure it
> will be :o)


How embarrassing!  Ok, that one's fixed in the code, it'll appear on the
live site next time I do a deployment.  Thanks.

>
> Display of month list events - I wonder if it would be easier to
> visually scan for events if the date was displayed first.  I'd perhaps
> use a slightly smaller text for the first line - date/event - and a
> slightly larger (but still smaller than the other) text for the second
> line - address of event, with the two lines closer to each other and a
> more distinctive gap between separate entries.  In the publish form
> there was a box for city, region or neighbourhood.  I think it would
> be useful to display this on the second line, before the actual
> address, because then the first thing you'll see is London, Cardiff or
> whatever, rather than an address which may not be meaningful unless
> you happen to know it.


I was thinking that the whole layout of event display is really ugly, if
we can find somebody to do the CSS stuff for this then it'll look good,
otherwise I'll try to do this myself...


>
> Calendar view - might be useful to display the
> city/region/neighbourhood field on the calendar so you can see where
> the event is without following the link.

Ah, good idea, and easy to do. 

I'll get to some or all of these in the next round of coding, although
I'm going to be away this coming weekend (when most of the code work
gets done) so I can't say when exactly.  I'll see if I can get some of
it done weeknights this week after work. 

Thanks very much to everyone who provided feedback, a lot of good ideas
have come my way and I'm trying to act on them - Wietse suggested
showing tags only for events that are in the future, for example, and
this seems to be working alright. 

Yoss