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[lectrichead]

  This is a community events calendar for a county in upstate NY.   Along with the excellent calendar software itself I've made a number of changes over the years to it including adding plug-ins and mods I found in this forum as well as some I've come up with myself myself.

  For a part of a community webboard (which I started many years ago and then handed off to others who had more time for it) we tried out various free calendars, which were okay, but lacking - and then I ran across Calendarscript.   The features, of course, were way above what other software had, including free software and free hosted software.   

  But we weren't sure if we could swing the registration fee, running the very popular high-traffic webboard and it's related systems on a shoe-string budget.   One of the members who were constantly on the webboard chatting donated the money for the calendar so we knew then we would then be able to keep the software.

  I started tweaking the template a bit to add a few simple graphics for linking back to themain website, a disclaimer, and a page for submitting new events via either a form or an e-mail link (the e-mail link is protected by a Javascript anti-spam harvestor script).   I originally was letting people use the calendar's 'Add Event' but people weren't taking advantage of the ability to add graphics, PDF's, and other stuff, so now we just allow them to submit the whole event and cut n' paste it in ourselves, and upload the graphics or external photos to our staorage space (or sometimes tinypic. com if I'm lazy, and reference the link so that the photo shows up when a person clicks the event).   I can also do some nice HTML formatting for people's events, as well as sign-up sheets and things like that.   Orignally others who paid for and ran the webboard system were helping me but eventually I just took over the whole calendar part myself.

  Also I use the free Statcounter. com website and insert the code into certain events for those who want to see how many people click on their individual events, how long they take to read them, where they're from, and with statcounter's ability to add users and only allow them accessto their stats it works well.

  I've added the e-mail reminder plug-in which many people take advantage of and also the 'Delete Old' plugin for deleting ranges of old events.   

  I've left the visual aspect of the default template pretty well intact, except for adding graphics at the top for submitting events, and graphical links at the bottom for the disclaimer, donations to the calendar, and links back to major local websites.

  For when I add events I've increase the visual size of the form fields for the description box and the title, and increased the maximum size of the title field for longer title descriptors.

  I've added a popup and tool reminder (using ALT and TITLE to cover bothe IE and Geck/Mozilla browser engines) for when people move their mouse over an event that tells them to click it to see the full description of the events.

  The other two major ones I've made were to add the ability for text color to be changed and for icons to be added as a bullet in front of each event.   When an event is added the colors are selected via a drop-down boxas well as the icons (see capture 4 below).   If no color or icon is picked a default bullet and color are used.   I think this modification is one of the best, it makes a somewhat drab calendar more visually pleasing.   The color mod was found here on the webboard, and I expanded on that with the icon mod (some suggestions from Dan O.  once I posted about it).   

  The nice thing is people can search by the icons also.   Say you want to find all events that are vehicle related - you just search for a wheel icon.   Or boat-related, you search for a boat.

  A few other little tweaks I've made.

  As you can see inthe screen shots this calendar is one of the most popular for this small area with amoderate population.   Many local communities send us thei village or town events en masse for adding, as well as their signs, banners, and graphics for inclusion.   Over 89,000 hits since we got the calendar and still running.

[LadyDi]

What I do like it the fact that you can add the event icons and the mouse over event effect.  I need to learn how to do both.  Suggestions??

[lectrichead]

You can see it in action here - hxxp: calendar.   jeffcowebboard.  com , BTW.   

Some of the changes are a little complicated so you don't want to do them if you have no idea what you are doing, it can break your calendar.   

The ability to change and add different colors to the events was from threads found here on this webboard - hxxp: www.  calendarscript.  com/support/forum/index.   php/topic,918.  0.  html and hxxp: www.  calendarscript.  com/support/forum/index.  php/topic,1555.  0.  html

Once I found that I was able to make some modifications to add icons, you can find my thread here on a thread from the old webboard - hxxp: much2.  com/calendarscript/000314.  html

With the suggestions of DanO I was able to make some changes to it and it worked quite well.      Also, I think I made some other tweaks later but didn't add them to that thread.   

The mouse-over effect was the result of something I saw posted here fairly recently, though I can't find the thread at the moment.     

Marc

EDIT - strange, the webboard changed the t's in the address to x's and put spaces in.

[Lady Di]

They don't allow URL's in any posts as a "newbie".   Cuts back on SPAM, ya know.   I'm reading your info and will try to get my update done first and foremost.  .  .   MOD it later.   Thanks for he info, no doubt. 

BTW - Was able to locate the old forum add icon thread.  Copied, pasted and saved needed info.