Let's use this thread to discuss similarities, differences and tasks to merge efforts made on WorldClock and Clock modules.

Comments

tstoeckler’s picture

tstoeckler
he/him
Primary language German
Location Essen, Germany
commented

Great plan! I made a list a while ago in #717502: Merge with Worldclock about differences of the two modules so going from there.

Worldclock

  1. Can display multiple times.
  2. Can display country of time zone e.g. Germany (whereas Clock shows the PHP Timezone e.g. Europe/Berlin)
  3. Can display a daylight savings time marker
  4. Can display a footnote
  5. Uses a seperate admin page for the configuration
  6. Uses setInterval to update the time via JS

Clock

  1. Depends on Date API
  2. Reuses configured short, medium, long and custom date fomats.
  3. Reuses site time zone and user time zone
  4. Can display the time in the user's local time (= operating system) time zone (due to the ongoing merge efforts with Time block)
  5. Uses the block admin for configuration
  6. Uses jQuery Timers to update the time via JS
flevour’s picture

flevour commented

Hi Tobias,
your detailed response is mind-blowing. Thanks for taking the time to put it down.
I think the main Worldclock features are WC1, WC2 and WC3 from your list. Reading through other threads I understand you are against the merge, because of the different use cases each module covers.
I personally see WC4 and WC6 as bugs, as they re-invent the wheel or do stuff pertaining to another layer (footnote should be in theming vs configuration).
Is your "won't fix" proposition changed since clsoing this issue #717502: Merge with Worldclock?
Have you got any suggestions?
Francesco

tstoeckler’s picture

tstoeckler
he/him
Primary language German
Location Essen, Germany
commented

Well, in the end I think it makes sense to merge. The overlap is about 80% I'd say, it just doesn't make sense the way it is now.
The reason I'm a bit reluctant is because I very much value Clock module's simplicity of not having a seperate admin page. That is something we/I would have to give up.
Fundamentally I think the problem is that the core block system is not flexible enough to support multiple blocks of the same type. If that were possible I think the whole situation would be a different one.

Even if Clock module were to move to a seperate admin page, the question is, though, how do you cater for the two use-cases with one UI:
1. Somebody just wants a simple clock showing the time.
2. Somebody wants a table with multiple clocks from mutliple countries showing which are in daylight savings time currently.

Btw, I changed that other issue's status to 'duplicate'.

tstoeckler’s picture

tstoeckler
he/him
Primary language German
Location Essen, Germany
commented

What could be done, of course, is have both modules in one project or namespace and then have something like a clock_api.module or time_api.module and then have the two different UIs on top of that utilizing the same code. That would work, but I guess the question is if that wouldn't be overkill and if the UI problem cannot be solved differently.

flevour’s picture

flevour commented

I agree with you the approach in #4 could be a bit overkill for such small projects.
What about a module that lets you dynamically add-up an arbitrary number of clock configurations (the core thing would work similarly to http://www.userscape.com/blog/wp-content/code/dynamiclists.html) and show them in a block.
The vanilla installation would default to what Clock currently offers. But it could be expanded with a growing number of clocks from the admin backend.
I hope I conveyed the idea, I am on the run now!
Let's keep in mind not to build up a huge list of module dependencies!

tstoeckler’s picture

tstoeckler
he/him
Primary language German
Location Essen, Germany
commented

I did not quite understand what you mean in #5.
Do you mean on the block configuration page (eg admin/build/block/clock/1/configure or something) you basically have an "Add more" button for clocks? That would actually be a great idea IMO, but I'm not sure you meant that.

flevour’s picture

flevour commented

I wasn't thinking a per-block configuration, that would be even more cool. But you got the idea. Default is one clock per block, then you can add more clocks to the same block.
Following up on this idea, it could also be possible to support multiple blocks as http://drupal.org/project/menu_block does.

tstoeckler’s picture

tstoeckler
he/him
Primary language German
Location Essen, Germany
commented

@flevour: You can have a look at the current 7.x-2.x-dev snapshot of Clock module (http://drupal.org/node/791726), which now supports multiple clocks. I'd appreciate your feedback in #937134: Support multiple clocks.
This brings us one step closer to making a merge possible. We basically now need to find out which of World Clock's feature's are still missing in Clock.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented
Issue summary: View changes

Hey, I am new here. I want a feature in clock with autorun update like runtime clock.
I have a template file with having different timezones and display their current time. But I am facing a problem i.e, autorun clock is not working. I usually used a JavaScript code for reloading the clock within a few seconds. That is working fine only just for single data. But when I have multiple data in the same category that get mixed up and not getting the update too.

Please suggest.

Regards