Creating a project for a "Scheduler" Module

I'm pretty familiar with the event module, since I've submitted patches for it. There's a definite overlap of purpose with what I'm doing with the event module, the rsvp module, and the volunteer module. But after looking at the code of all of them, it looked easier to start from scratch than to modify any of the three to add my features.

The main thing my module adds is UI: it creates a DHTML table that presents a weekly schedule for a site with multiple shifts during the day. At first glance, this is most similar to the event module. But modifying any of event's UI to do what I want was actually harder than starting from scratch. So I decided to code something clean. The current event API doesn't really have the hooks I need for this, although arguably you could integrate my code as a new display type. But I think that would be harder than what I actually did.

I'm actually using a bit of heavily modified code from the the new version of the volunteer module, since I like the way it interfaces with CiviCRM. And my database tables are modeled after volunteer's tables. But volunteer is very tightly integrated with event, and it wasn't obvious how to "shake it loose". So I used that code as a model, but modified it to allow someone to volunteer to a shift, rather than to an event.

Also: you're right about the name conflicts. I've tentatively renamed the module "shift_signup", subject to approval by Those Who Decide around here.

Rob Thorne
Torenware Networks
http://www.torenware.com

schwa,

Much thanks for your thanks :-)

Being able to use this contraption as a "room scheduler" was indeed one of the things I was thinking about. (1), (2) and (4) are major features. Mostly, (2) and (4) is the main idea of the design.

(1) I want to do, but since I had a specific application in mind short run, my "nodes" are a one week schedule for a site, with the days of the week as columns, and the shifts as rows. In the initial version, you have to reenter the shifts for each week. This was "good enough" for what I need to do now. I'll eventually change the design in such a way that you set up a "site" once, and generate weekly calendars from that.

(3) is probably my lowest priority, since at least for the sort of things I'm doing now, a week is a good "planning horizon". But I suspect that other people will also need the other views as well, so eventually, it's likely to happen.

As for not using Civicspace: the only thing you'll need to install that's at all exotic is CiviCRM 1.1, which is compatible with a vanilla install of Drupal 4.6. You'd have to install it manually, but having done that, I'll tell you that it isn't too bad to do (although definitely read the instructions very carefully).

Civicspace 0.8.2 will have CiviCRM as part of the default configuration, which will make it much easier to use my module. But even now, if you're comfortable installing Drupal 4.6, you should be OK.

Rob Thorne
Torenware Networks
http://www.torenware.com