[Oscailt] Resend of: Some thoughts on publishing multiple events dates.

[Terence S]

Resending this as apparently it got sent as a HTML attachment first time and got stripped off.

A number of people have requested that the ability to add multiple dates when publishing events, should be added to Oscailt. The general idea is that when you select the event date, an extra box would be present for something like "repeat number of days" and if you entered say 2, then extra drop down menus would appear for the extra 2 days.

Before doing this, it is probably worth considering a few issues.

a) Allowing multiple events during the same publish is attractive to spammers, so basic anti spam measures would have to be added..

b) What if for an event on say Fri, Sat and Sun, they all start at different times and the activity for each day is different. Would it not be better to add 3 separate submissions with the information for each one separately.

c) What if the user selects, Fri, Sat and Sun and then wants to change some of the information for Sat and Sun. There is no easy way to do this, unless they email the site editors.

d) Would it be better to change the database table for stories (where events are stored too) and and in an extra field for end_eventdate. There is already eventtime for the start date+time.  This would mean that the code for displaying the event calendar would have to repeat the entries when the days fall between the start_date and event_date. This means there would only be 'one' story for the event. This is the opposite to case a) above and has limitations if separate information is needed for each day.

Summary:
As  you can see adding this feature would create certain limitations and may not meet everyone's requirements. It would be useful for people to respond with their own ideas to help clarify what is the most ideal solution.

Note: I have a test system that accepts the start time. If the user adds this in, it is displayed just under the event date when viewed as an article. When the user does not enter anything it defaults to 00:00 and when it is 00:00 there is no display of the event time and is just like the present system.

rgds
Terence



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