Calendar Search and Download
 

Calendar Search and Download for vB4

This mod addresses yet another basic feature missing from vB4 - calendar search and download :mad:


Features:

Replaces the Calendar menu item with a drop-down menu which adds a calendar search and export function. You can search in username, event title, description. custom fields, calendar and by year/month range. You can also export the search results (or the full calendar) as an iCalendar file (for import into a PC, mobile, Google, etc) or as a PDF text document.

Both export functions include email contact information for the event poster (provided that the current user has permission to view member groups and send emails AND the event poster allows email contact).

NEW! - v1.04b onward supports automated Google Calendar updates (view your vB calendar on Google alongside your other calendars!)

You can use the automatic indexing feature in Google Calendars to view your forum calendar (and sync it with your Nokia/iPhone/BlackberryAndroid/etc cell phone). Only calendars that have unregistered user access will be viewable (Unregistered Usergroup->can view calendars & ->view others events to yes).

To setup Google Calendars (http://www.google.com/calendars) to view your vB calendar(s) , select Other calendars->add->add by URL then enter http://your_forum_url/calsearch.php?do=gcal (replacing your_forum_url with your real forum URL!). Google can take many hours to actually index the vB calendar so be patient! If you want to start from a particular year - &startyear=20xx (it defaults to the current year).

Tested with Vbulletin 4.0.2 AND vBadvanced 4 beta. Product has no custom phrases or template/code edits. It uses two template hook locations in the navbar to change the calendar menu to a drop-down.


Settings:
None are needed - it does what it says on the tin :p.

AdminCP->vbulletin->options->message searching options->search results per page

Determines the number of event items displayed per page.


Installation

1. Unzip the download package and copy the contents of the UPLOAD folder into your forum folder.
2. Go to the VB AdminCP->Plugins & Products click "Manage Products". The click "Add/ImportProduct" at the bottom of the page.
3. Click "Browse" button and point to the product-calsearch-(etc).XML file included in this ZIP package.
4. Click "Import"

... all done


Updates

To update- uninstall the product AND delete the uploaded file calsearch.php then re-install as above.

v1.10
tested with vB 4.0.3
Recurring events now grouped by date
v1.09b
Added month selection options
v1.08b
Now allows reverse date order search (by entering a "To" year less than the "From" year.
Fixed user timezone issue with iCal files
v1.07b
Added full support for recurring events (also included in iCal export)
v1.06b
Changed search option layout
Start year now uses current year if no year selected (iCal/PDF/Google downloads all start from current year).
v1.05b
Standardised phrasing
Added "no events found" message
v1.04b:
Added calendar selection dropdown
Fixed IE layout issues
Added Google Calendar support
v103b:
Fixed time zone issue yet again (it DOES work this time!):o
v102b:
Fixed time zone issue properly this time :o
Added drop down to select search field
Added support for searching custom calendar fields.
v101b:
Fixed time zone date calculation (was showing event on wrong day in some locales)



John

This is looking good, Thanks! Although my links on the calendar search don't link to the event properly.

They seem to be linking to an event the day before the event.
http://www.claystation.com/forum/cal...2010-01-10&c=2

but it should be...
http://www.claystation.com/forum/cal...o&day=2010-01-11&c=2

Also I have a lot of calendars so on the search result page it would look a lot nicer if the results were displayed by calendar and date instead of just the date. Just a suggestion.

Thanks for your work.

This issue has been fixed - see latest download in first post.

Thanks - I uploaded the file but it didn't do the trick.

I've updated the above file again - definitely should work this time :)

I don't know... it's still not working. :erm:

This looks very good - Tagged.

Gonna watch this one

Ive just installed this and it works great, so thank you

Ive been playing around with getting it to sync with Google Calendar which works fine if you download the iCal file and manually sync it with Google Calendar

Would it be possible to make this a Scheduled Task on the forum so that it ran say every day at midnight and saved the iCal output somewhere on the server? That way I could then point Google Calendar at the URL of the saved iCal file and see how it behaves, see if it auto updates when the iCal file is updated

Interesting idea - and no reason why it shouldn't work. Google Calendar does update OK from URL files - I use it elsewhere. I can feel another mod coming on :)

The iCal file would obviously only contain public events - i.e. events viewable by unregistered users.

This is working very well. The added field queries are very nice. How difficult would it be to able to search one just one calendar at a time with this? If I can do this it will solve a lot of problems for my site.
Thanks

This looks interesting for my ?what?s on? site, I'll take another look tomorrow when I am less screen-stir crazy. :D

This mod is really interesting. I have some suggestions for further improvement and new features:
I don't really like the drop-down menu with the subitems "Calendar search" and "Calender". Can you make this drop-down menu optional with a setting? I think it would be more logical to add the search fields to the "calendar" page/template. You can there also make some export buttons (iCal/Gmail/PDF/...). Now you have to search for "nothing" to be able to export the whole calendar.

Thanks for this mod!

Thanks for the suggestions. The calendar selection drop-down only appears if you have more than one calendar.

The default (when you click calendar search on the navbar menu) is to list all calendar content - you can then immediately click the download buttons to get everything. You can, of course, select a calendar then search and download to get just one calendar content (or one event type, etc).

I would agree that this mod should be part of the vB search system (both in the advanced search page and in the calendar itself). However, the calendar templates are buggy at the moment so I won't be spending time working with them until they are fixed :rolleyes:

OK, I?ve had a chance to install this and I am well pleased with results so far, just a couple of things that would be an improvement if possible.

1 - by default the date range selected is 2008 - 2037; surely it should start with 2010, it?s only a small thing, but is there an easy way of changing it?

2 - the 'search for' button (or renamed 'search now') should be positioned at the end of all the options you need to complete/consider, i.e. after the date range, at the moment you work your way from left to right and when you get to the end you have to go back to the start to press search. Does that make sense? https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/

3- and I agree with digibyte about making the drop-down menu optional, if possible.

I've put a link to the calendar search in my dropdown menu for 'What's On & Event Calendars' in my navbar, see here http://doctorwatson.info/calsearch.php, but what I could do with now is removing the vb search box from the navbar as this is going to cause confusion - can anyone point me in the right direction for doing that?

I?ll then add that search to the forum dropdown menu instead.

I've made some changes (v1.06b+) which address some of these issues. The start year defaults to the current year (the drop-down allows earlier years to be selected). The search options have been rearranged to make better use of page space. The calendar selection remains as there is no easy way to handle multiple calendars otherwise

You may find it easier (now a decent calendar search is available :)) to use calendar custom fields to categorise your event entries in a single calendar rather than having multiple calendars? That would get rid of the calendar selection drop-down!

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2011/01/19.gif Now that's what I call service, shame you're not running IB/Jelsoft at the moment. :D

The search options order seems so much more logical and layout cleaner, great improvement.

I?ll have a think about that, my first thoughts is it maybe not a great idea for my sort of site ? it would work if you knew what you were looking for, i.e. a search for ?Fred?s Flying Circus? brings up one result, and that?s happening 7-days a week for the period it?s listed for.

I did a search for ?Car Boot Sale? for 2009, on the basis the season hasn?t started properly yet this year, and it returns 50+, but recurring ones are only listed for the date range and not the day of the week. So, for example, it would be easier to view a calendar and see what particular ones were on for this Sunday.

Another example would be cinema listings; again if you just wanted to see what?s on this week, rather than a specific film, a search would list everything for the whole year, as you can?t search just for a weekend/week or month.

Just noticed a search for ?car boot sales? doesn?t return results for ?car boot sale?, which is actually how most of them are listed as they are singular events, but I can see people searching by the plural. https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/

Although, I guess, that?s where custom fields could work, not that I would have a clue how to put them in place, until I got hold of vb4.02 about four weeks ago my only ?web-build? experience was running a standard vb3 installation for a year, with no hacks nor mods installed even!

I am a right numpty, but learning fast, for some reason I thought upgrading and adding a few bells and whistles was going to be easy. http://79.170.40.233/doctorwatson.in...s/facepalm.gif

Attached is an updated version (now included in mod!) that handles recurring events by listing them (and their event dates) if they are occur within the selected year range. I haven't properly tested monthly recurring events as I can't work out how you set them in the calendar (the user interface is seriously deficient in that area :mad:).

Works OK here. The search works on event titles and content, not the calendar title (you can select the calender from the drop-down)

Nice one - that seems to work OK, even for monthly recurring events - I've tested it on a couple of business networking events and Chamber Chat comes up as 'Monthly....First Wednesday' and the First Friday Network comes up as monthly and, as you would expect, on the First Friday - lol.

I agree the user interface for adding events is crap, worst than on vb3, and is causing my users confusion hence I am either having to add events myself or moderate most users adding their own, so I can correct mistakes. :mad:

Actually, there’s a thought, the search returns a ‘contact’ on the right of results, which is the person that added the event but not necessary the organiser/contact for it, could that be made optional, or maybe replaced with the ‘to & from’ times?

That's odd, because a search for car boot sales (with the 's') brings up 3 results, 2 of which doesn't include the 's' in event title nor content, in fact one doesn't even use the words 'sale or sales'.

However, a search for car boot sale returns 7 results and a search for just car boot brings up 8 results - be buggered if I can work out why. https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/

Similar problems searching for farmers' market but worst because you can add an 's' or not to both the words and it doesn't return those with the apostrophe if you haven't included the apostrophe in the search, e.g. farmers market

ETA - And even worst it shows me up for the misuse of the apostrophe when I've imputed some as 'Farmer's Market'. :o :D

All three entries contain "sales" (one has invisible text with the word in it :confused: - do a browser search on the event page and you will find it)

"car boot" is in "car boot sales" so it will find both (it's a simple character string search , not a word list search).

Are you expecting the search to know that you meant to add an apostrophe in the middle of the search phrase?

The product has been updated in the orginal post above to include the recurring event code. The iCal/Google export also now supports recurring events.

You have two v1.06b in your changelog ;)

How can I disable e-mail showing in the pdf and icalendar downloads? I'm using the send mail feature of vbulletin and don't want the email address of users clearly shown.

Thanks for the awesome mod, just what I was looking for.

If the event poster has email disabled in their settings then they won't show in the PDF or iCal files.

I've also modified the code (download v1.07b again) to check the email sending permissions of the current user - if they are not allowed to send email then it won't appear in the files.

Thanks for the answer. But I'm using the mail sender inside vB because I do not want to publish user's email in the clear. The PDF does just that.

Even if users accept emails, on my forums they are sent emails by the internal module. Other users do not have access to their addresses (unless the person replies to the e-mail, but that's fine obviously).

Extracting text from a PDF is a torturous process - it's a fairly secure format. If you want to disable email addresses completely from PDF's then you will need to edit the PHP file calsearch.php

Around line 484 delete the red text:
OR - if you want to disable PDF downloads altogether then, rather than edit the PHP file, edit the calsearch_result template and delete the red line:

Code:

---

<span style="float:right;">
{vb:rawphrase save}:&nbsp;
<input type="submit" class="button" align="right" name="do" value="i{vb:rawphrase calendar}" tabindex="7" />
<input type="submit" class="button" align="right" name="do" value="PDF {vb:rawphrase calendar}" tabindex="8" />
</span>

---

Great, I think this will be useful.

Any thought on having the start date today's date by the end of the year their are going to be a lot of events display on calsearch.php that already past.

Good point - I've added a month selection option to the start and end year which should solve this (or at least reduce it by 12 :)).

will there be support for 4.0.3? got this:


This product is not compatible with version 4.0.3 of vBulletin. (Compatible starting with 4.0.2 / Incompatible with 4.0.3 and greater)

Edit: changed the xml to 4.0.4max and got this error when trying to search events:

Database error in vBulletin 4.0.3:

Invalid SQL:

SELECT
event.title,eventid,event,event.dateline,event.rec urring, event.recuroption,
user.username,user.userid,
calendar.title as caltitle,calendar.calendarid,
IF(event.dst<>'0', event.dateline_from + ( * 3600), event.dateline_from + ( * 3600)) as dateline_from,
IF(event.dateline_to<>'0',
IF(event.dst<>'0', event.dateline_to + ( * 3600), event.dateline_to + ( * 3600))
,'0')
AS dateline_to,
IF(
('1') AND
(user.options & '256')
,user.email, '') AS email
FROM
event AS event
LEFT JOIN user AS user ON (event.userid = user.userid)
LEFT JOIN calendar AS calendar ON (calendar.calendarid = event.calendarid)
WHERE
event.visible = 1
AND event.calendarid IN ('1')
AND(
(
((event.dateline_from <= 2145852000) AND (event.dateline_from >= 1270098000))
OR ((event.dateline_to <= 2145852000) AND (event.dateline_to >= 1270098000))
)
OR
( event.recurring<>0
AND ((event.dateline_to >= 1270098000) AND (event.dateline_from <= 2145852000))
)
)

ORDER BY recurring DESC, dateline_from ASC
LIMIT 0, 25;

MySQL Error : You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '* 3600), event.dateline_from + ( * 3600)) as dateline_from,
IF(event.datelin' at line 5
Error Number : 1064
Request Date : Wednesday, April 14th 2010 @ 05:35:13 PM
Error Date : Wednesday, April 14th 2010 @ 05:35:13 PM
Script :
Referrer :
IP Address :
Username : admin
Classname : vB_Database
MySQL Version : 5.0.89-community

1.08b is working for me on 4.03 it was installed though on 4.02. and still works after the upgrade.

It works OK on upgrades but not on clean installs due to a change in the vB code - I've fixed the mod to work either way with v1.10.

Installed v1.10 on v4.03 ...

Very nice.. works great !! :up:

Thank you ... :)

Regards,
Badger

I am using VB ver 4.03 and the calsearch_110.
But I can not import the calendar into Outlook or Google when I use the url
http://sasac.org.uk/upload/calsearch.php?do=gcal
until I reformat the output by replacing the space character with a carriage return, such as
http://sasac.org.uk/CalendarExp

Has this not installed correctly or is there alternative to do=gcal

The links you show point to two different iCal files - can you supply links to the same file?

The iCal files have c/ret in the correct places - replacing all spaces with c/r will corrupt the file format.

I'd don't use Google Calendar, but do have iCal files I'd love to set-up to 'auto-import' once a day would be great!

Does this mod have any conflicts while working Farcaster Event Attendance Mod?

I would think plenty a this mod is for vb4 and Farcaster is for vb3.6! There is a vb3.8 version available at:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...=239402&page=2

... which may work. The mod doesn't make any database changes so it shouldn't cause any problems

would it be possible to have a pdf output in a calendar format? This way someone could download the calendar view in PDF for printing without all of the other stuff form the website (such as the two small prev & next months, and banner, etc).

Also, after importing the ical to Outlook, the details are not full. Looks like there is a cut-off limit and then a ... is added to the end of that. Would it be possible to include the entire content of the event details?

Just tested it on 4.0.5 w/the Farcaster Event mod (product-rah_calendar_rsvp_3_0_0b.xml)

Cal. Search & Download steps on FCEM, so that while you can set the option to RSVP, people cannot actually RSVP the event, as the option does not display.

It's a trade-off as to which one you want. Personally, I'm going with Search & Download as it seems like it would be more useful to people on my forum.