THE WEB CALENDAR PROJECT

1. THE WEB CALENDAR PROJECT Presented by: Jasmine Thomas Supervisor: John Ebden

2. MOTIVATION • Need for a common platform on which the events held within the University can be advertised • Staff – Events List Mailing List • Students – Web Calendar • Options were to create something new or configure the existing technologies to work together

3. My Project

5. EVENTS LIST – MAILING LIST 2 Staff member submits event notification as an e-mail to the mailing list moderator List moderator approves the event notice, and submits it 1 Mailing list archive IMAP mail server 3 Event notice is mailed out to all subscribers of the list and it is archived

6. WEB CALENDAR 2 Database 1 Event notice stored in a backend database, held for approval by calendar administrator Student logs onto Web Calendar, hosted on the University’s Official site and submits an event notification 3 Administrator logs on And approves the event notice, event notice is now viewable on the Web Calendar Web Calendar

7. Component Integration Database Mailing list archive web server web server

8. PROBLEM ENVIRONMENT • Events List – Mailing List (Mailman) • Web Calendar – HTML, Perl Scripts, MySQL database. • Apache Web server + Unix systems

9. TECHNOLOGIES USED Mailman MySQL Database Mailing list archive PHP/PERL Apache web servers on Unix box

10. PHP • Low and smooth learning curve • String manipulations capabilities (Regular Expressions) • Ease with which it can interface with databases (MySQL) • Intelligent error reporting – debugging easier • Compatibility with Apache • Cross platform – build on Windows and port it to Unix

11. Events-L available at http://listserv.ru.ac.za/pipermail/events-l/

12. ARCHIVE

13. ARCHIVE MONTHLY SUBMISSIONS

14. ARCHIVE MONTHLY SUBMISSIONS INDIVIDUAL EVENT DETAILS

17. DATE ISSUE...

18. Date Issue – Possible Solutions -- Educate the users -- Changing source code for mailman -- Setup a web template

19. EDUCATING THE USERS dd/mm/yyyy: event subject

20. Users being users… [dd/mm/yyyy]: [event subject] dd/mm/yyyy, dd/mm/yy, d/mm/yyyy, d/mm/yy, dd/m/yyyy, dd/m/yy, d/m/yyyy, d/m/yy. [date format]_[:]_[event subject]

21. REGULAR EXPRESSION '/\<A\s+HREF=\"(\d+)\.html\"\>\s*\[Events-L\]\s+ ((\d{2}|\d{1})\/(\d{2}|\d{1})\/(\d{4}|\d{2})) [\s*][:][\s*](.+?)\s*$/'

24. MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE EVENT… Location, Starting time, Host, Reasons for hosting the event etc. Two options 1. build the link to the file with the details 2. extract all the details from file

26. <!--beginarticle -->----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------- <!--endarticle --> '/\<\!\-\-beginarticle\-\-\>\n+/' '/\<\!\-\-endarticle\-\-\>\n+/'

27. IMPLEMENTATION • Unix corn command was written to execute the script at regular intervals. • No hassles porting PHP from Windows to Unix. to prove that it is all working…

28. EXTENSIONS TO THE PROJECT • creative feature that can be deployed on the University’s main page to increase awareness of the Web Calendar’s improved functionality. • central moderator for both the Web Calendar and the Events List. • change the look of the Web Calendar to integrate better with the University’s purple theme. • avoid duplicate submissions – i.e. reminders posted on the events list.

29. QUESTIONS??