i'm going to be developing an Availability Module for drupal, which i'll outline below--if all goes well it should be released before the end of june. i wanted to get a discussion started on the possible features/functionality of this module so i can develop it with everyone's best interest in mind. that said...
CASE STUDY?:
specifically this need arose out of communication difficulties my band has been experiencing--our booking person would like a more efficient way to see what dates everyone is available to play a show. right now it's a big email-fest in order to get everybody's status, and i think it would be much more efficient if there was a central place where all the band members could mark/view their availability.
so what is needed is some way for users w/ the appropriate edit permissions to be able to mark their availability for certain days, and for users w/ view permissions to look at a calendar and get an overview of who's available on each day of a week or month, etc.
here's an early run of how i'm picturing the functionality:
three permission levels: view availability, edit own availability, admin availability
users w/ view permissions would see a list of everyone who's marked their availabilty for a certain date, displayed in a calender (looks like i'll be using the functionality of event.module for calendar rendering)
users w/ edit own permissions would see a checkbox appear in each date on the calendar, where they can mark/unmark their availability for the day.