Support

April 17, 2015 at 3:31 am

Hi!

I just installed EE Calendar Addon (v4) on a dev site and it’s coming along but still needs lots of love in my opinion.

I’m part of your github repo since I’ve contributed some code to core and was surprised to not find the calendar addon there? I figured I could do some pull requests with updated code if so but as it is I don’t want to code stuff only to have it removed with the next update. It’d be nice with a repo!

Anyway, here’s some of my thoughts after tinkering with it for an hour or so. These are just about the sidebar widget as that’s what I’m using:

• The flag-icon is very arbitrary and frankly a bit strange.. but to be honest I don’t have a better suggestion for the sidebar widget so I’ll leave that be.
• You really need to add some better structure to the tooltip content. Wrapping the wp_content stuff in it’s own div would come a long way and make it so much easier to modify the look
• Not being able to select what to show in the tooltip is a pain. Especially combined with the above about the structure. Right now I’m trying to hide the content because it looks massive in the tooltip but keep the button. However sometimes the client has just pasted text right into the editor and there aren’t even any elements around the text to target. I’d love to see some options for choosing what to show in the tooltip.
• It seems you’re using qtip2 but for some reason you’ve disabled the viewport rendering? At least it’s not working at all when I test it out
• The sidebar widget calendar really shouldn’t use the regular EE cog loader since it makes it seem like I cant interact with the whole page until it’s loaded while in reality I’m just waiting for the calendar in the sidebar.

That’s the main points I could find. There are other stuff like why you’re using a select for resetting the calendar settings and the button texts are in the settings rather than as translatable localized strings (which I assume the buttons in the tooltip are). But that’s just minor annoyances to me as a fellow dev 🙂

An idea that came to mind when dealing with the sidebar widget specifically.. the way you render the events now is really not optimal for a smaller sized container. I understand you’re basically just using the same code as for the main calendar but modified it and use different CSS. However a much better solution for such a widget would be to have each date with events on it clickable (and have a indication on the date of wether it has events and perhaps how many) and when the user clicks it you load in the events. Either directly into the calendar or as a list underneath. Look at how Tribe does it https://theeventscalendar.com/product/wordpress-events-calendar-pro/
and an example: http://www.scuf.se/regionalt/ost/

A BIG bonus with this approach is that the initial pageload is so much smaller and faster and the events only gets loaded when needed to.