Support for simplified date field with repeat options widget

I checked out your demo, looks nice, but I think this is a better approach: #272404: Make 'until' field optional.
If we just make the until date optional, you would not need a check box for every year (or every month, or every week, or every day, or every hour........), and it could use the current repeat options, which are already in place.

Also, we don't need to eliminate the year requirement for things like birthdays and anniversaries. Those items could just be set as yearly repeating with no until date (goes forever). After all, they DID really happen on an actual date with a year.

I do agree that the current repeat options can be overkill and confusing, but they are quite powerful, allowing for all sorts of repeat options. Instead of reducing the functionality, though, the interface could be improved. Also, if you don't want to expose all that power on your site, how about using some hook_form_alter or theming to adjust?

What do other people think? Do my thoughts above make sense? What direction should the Date module take?

I agree there is a need for a simpler UI for repeats, but there is no agreement about exactly what that would look like. I think your concept is interesting, a number of preset rules with simple labels, 'yearly', 'weekly', 'every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday', etc. The problem is deciding what those presets should be and coming up with a list that is long enough to be useful without being overwhelming.

We can easily add in a field setting to allow a switch from the 'simple' to the 'advanced' form, or keep the advanced options hidden away in a collapsed fieldset, or whatever.

Before spending time writing code though, I would like to see some thought go into exactly what this UI would look like -- what options would be shown in our 'simple' model.

I have been looking at other calendar systems for guidance -- Google calendar, Yahoo calendar, Upcoming.org, Meetup.com, etc. I think it is perfectly acceptable to take screenshots from them and make notes and changes on them and saying 'we should make it look like this'.

Hmmm, all good thoughts here.
Here is another one:
What if we are approaching this from the wrong direction? In the case of a birthday or anniversary, in reality, these ARE SINGLE dates (I was born on mm/dd/yy at hh:mn), but they are recognized annually (or monthly or weekly in the case of young love-sick couples anniversaries’ ;-).
We could keep the date as such (just a single date event)...
BUT....
In our views, we should be able to filter ignoring the year. So, we could make a list with all birthdays this month or all brithdays today. Or somehow, show all birthdays on the calendar regardless of the calendar year.
This would also be useful for those that want to do some sort of "on this day in history" type queries.

This approach places the burden on how the view display is configured and not how the date is entered, which I think is appealing. Users would have a simple date enty from, but all the heavy lifting would be done by the site builder.

Maybe this is possible now?

Ahhh, wait. I get it now (at least I think so). I was ignoring the title here. We are really talking about 2 different things.
Your proposal is ONLY about adding another widget type or options for simpler repeat options. The underlying data structure and format need not change, just the options presented to the user. Not quite as all-inclusive, but that is not always needed.
Great! I wholeheartedly agree!
Sorry for confusing the issue.

I was trying to promote the #272404: Make 'until' field optional issue, which I now understand is something completely different than what you intended (although as you said, quite desirable).
I will put the "on this day in history" feature request in another issue.

Hi chaps 2 - love your patch - had a client that needed to add several hundred pages to their site, all with anniversaries, and your repeat option saved them.

Any chance you could post a patch version for the most recent dev version of Date?

Thanks again.

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I like the simplified interface. Now if it only supported multiple presets then this could be a viable widget.

chaps2: Have you considered splitting this out into a separate module? that might make it easier to work with and hack on.

I tested the patch from #2 against 2.x-dev and I am getting several of the following error:

warning: date_format() expects parameter 1 to be DateTime, string given in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/repo/date/sites/all/modules/date/date_api.module on line 710.

However the patch works, and it is correctly saving the repeated dates. Thanks for the great patch!

I hard-coded and hacked the widget a bit so that it is a select list with a predetermined rrule set of options (see image).

I tried splitting it out into its own module, unsuccessfully. I had trouble integrating with the existing date widgets/fields (it seemed like a few things were hard coded). Anyway my code is not well designed, so I am not going to post it, but if anyone wants more info I am glad to share.

THANK YOU!
chaps2 from #2
You are #1!!

@entrigan - I'm trying to accomplish exactly what your screenshot shows. Could you please share your info w/ me?

@entrigan - I second that, please post some code.

I applied the patch from #2 into Date 6.x-2.6 and it didn't seem to work.

I've installed the patch but I'm getting an error now when i go to the specific content type to edit: - manage fields - date:

Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required './sites/all/modules/date/date/date_admin.inc' (include_path='.;C:\php5\pear') in C:\wamp\www\website\sites\all\modules\date\date\date.module on line 546

It was my first patch ever..

but I applied it to date 6.x

my steps were;

I put the patch file at C:/
opened Cygwin.bat (like cmd)

with cd I went to the specific map of the date module
then i patched it;
c:/cygwin/bin/patch.exe -p0 <
this should be correct, i followed cygwin steps @ drupal website

it patched 3 files:
date/date_admin.inc
date/date_repeat.inc
date_repeat/date_repeat-form.inc

so after it did that, i tried to go to content type - manage fields - date.. but then I get the error.

The file date_admin.inc is still there..

it works now! Don't know why, I copied the patched files to a seperate folder, then I downloaded my (working) website again with the normal files, than I copied the pathed files and overwrited the normal files, now it does work! I am so glad!! Thank you so much!

chaps2, I've installed the presets module and activated it, but can't find where to set the presets. Very excited about this module. Saves me a lot of hacking. Thanks.

Thanks, I found it and it works fine. Great job. I can see a lot of people who will find this very useful.

Just tested it out, it works great and as expected.

In my opinion, this simplified widget is in most cases superior and more appropriate than the current date repeat selection widget, and therefor this module should be (once ready) included in the date module.

However understandably there are a lot of reasons why adding ui complexity to an "api" module would be unwanted, in which case I say we get this released as a separate contrib module ASAP.

Nice, I am looking for this solution for two days. Thanks!

But module itself is not working very well... If I chose Preset type, web freeze... and AHAH module is in conflict with HS module at all.

And there are some warnings:

Warning: Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated in C:\wamp\www\sites\all\modules\date_repeat_presets\date_repeat_presets.module on line 8

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@eL, I did not have any of these erros. What versios of each module are you using? and by HS are you referring to hierarchical select?