Calendar: events, deadlines and room bookings

Adding events to the calendar is very easy. This is done from Plone, while logged in. Go to the home page, click on "switch to contents view", then from the Select drop-down menu on the right click Event and then click Add new item. You will get a form; fill it in for name (same as ID in Zope), title, description, venue and most importantly date and time. When you are finished, click Save. Then go to Properties, enter some keywords if you wish, and save again. Finally go to Publishing, and depending on the kind of events, leave it visible, publish it or make it private.

If an event (say, a personal appointment) is made private, it will not show at all in the calendar box. Ideally, it should only be visible to the person who has created it. The way to do this is to open the Plone folder in Program Files, open the Data folder, open the Products folder, open the CMFCalendar folder, then (whew...!) open the CalendarTool.py script using Notepad. Then look for the word published and replace it with [published, private] everywhere (it is in five places). Both words (published, private) MUST be between single quotes. When you are done, click Save (NOT Save As....), close, restart Plone, and upon logging into your Plone site, you will see your private appointments.

If you move your mouse over a highlighted day in the calendar, you will see the time and title of all events for that day. If you click, however, the search will yield the published ones only, even after the changes you made to have the private events appear. In order to have ALL events listed, go to the ZMI and from there to Plone/portal_skins/plone_templates/ui_slots. Click on calendar_slot, then click on Customise. You are now in the Custom folder. Search for the word "published"; you will find it highlighted in "search?review_state=published&start:date". Delete "review_state=published&", so that that bit of code reads "search?start:date", and save your changes. Restart Plone. Clicking on a highlighted day will now yield ALL events, published and private, scheduled for that day. Anonymous visitor will still be unable to see the private events.

For room bookings, log into the room account and do the same; ditto for groupwork deadlines (in the corresponding group account).

Events can accumulate really quick: remember to delete old ones from time to time, to keep your database form becoming unnecessarily big.

News

You can add news exactly the same way as events, step by step: the only difference is that you have to choose News item from the drop-down Select menu. Any news item you add will appear both in the News slot and under the News tab.

You may want to create different types of news: for example, Sports News and People News. This involves creating two new "types" of items that can be added to a folder, and that should appear alongside Document, Event, News Item and all the others in the drop down "Select" menu. This is possible.