Journal
Free Calendar Template
20 October 2005 › 19 comments
No Strings Attached
When developing websites for various churches, I am usually able to use a blogging CMS to meet their needs for simple site maintenance and update functionality. Yet, I was often at an impass when it came to doing a monthly calendar. All the systems out there are either too robust and pricey (listing things down to the minute, like a personal day planner), or open-source but far too bloaty code-wise. I needed a good, standards compliant solution.
This led me to take matters into my own hands, and whip up a simple calendar template that can be hand-updated fairly easily by a church secretary or volunteer. After showing the template to a few friends, they suggested I look into developing a calendar system around it. While this is a bit beyond the scope of what I have time / knowledge for right now, I thought others out there might be able to benefit from this nice little bit of XHTML 1.0.
As of yet, there is nothing automated about it. You’ll still need to type in your month / year and day numbers. It is very light though, and incredibly easy to skin. The XHTML file contains only one table and one div, and the CSS has all been organized alphabetically for easy searching and modifying. To see ideas of how it could be skinned, check out the examples below:
Download source files for all three of these skins here: Calendar.zip (20kb).
Boring Details
This nifty calendar package is released under a Creative Commons License and may be redistributed, modified, tweaked, destroyed or whatever – as long as you do not charge for the work, and give credit where it is due. I just ask that you leave my first line intact in the CSS file, letting people know my name and site address. I would also appreciate an email or comment on this page if you decide to use it, so I can know if anybody actually cares.
It is my hope to see this developed into a lightweight admin system that can be updated monthly. It wouldn’t even have to support a full year, but just have a styled input form that would match the public-side. This would allow someone without HTML experience to update the site, and have the interface be nearly identical to the appearance on the site. The month and day numbers could be deleted and re-saved as needed, along with any scheduled events.
In case you’re thinking it, Yes – a calendar does count as tabular data. And, for those coding purists, the cellspacing="0" remains because according to Dave Shea the border-spacing CSS equivalent is not yet widely supported. I guess that sums things up, go check it out. Oh, and you get some extra points if you tell me where the inspiration came from for the pinky design!
Discussion + Dissension
Comments closed after 2 weeks.
#1 Ryan Merket
VERY NICE!! – I love the layout and the code is great! Very well done!
#2 Nathan Smith
Ryan, thanks – I’m glad you like it. I’m also planning an HTML 4.01 release, for use with Mozilla Composer which inserts old-school tags such as
brwith no trailing slash. This way people can set up Composer for their church / non-profit, and train someone to just make quick changes. And, when they do, the HTML will remain valid. Oddly enough, the latest Composer handles this template better than Dreamweaver MX 2004. Time for office upgrades!#3 Yannick
Nice work Nathan. I really like Khaki and Urban. Pinky I’m not too fond of though, but I am sure someone else will. :)
#4 Rea
This is wonderful! The calendars look absolutely wonderful. Really great work Nathan, thanks! I have to say that khaki is my favorite, it appeals to me the most. And the files are clean and clear. Thanks again! :o)
#5 Nathan Smith
Yannick: I just needed an idea for a third template, and that seemed like it’d be a fun variation to try. I doubt anyone will use these templates in their current forms, but they can be re-hashed as needed.
Rea: Thanks, glad you like the template. Feel free to use it for whatever projects it may be applicable for.
#6 Graham
Great work. I’ve been maintaining a table-based calendar for a client for a year now, and this would have come in handy. If I get a chance to re-do the guts of the thing, I’ll probably use this.
Did you the inspiration for your pinky design from Jaredigital ?
#7 Kyle Talbott
Great work. I will be using it for a school in the next month or so.
As for calendar cms’s… check out the work of Jason Maas. We worked together on a church site after I saw another great calendar that he did.
#8 Jeff Segars
Thanks for the calendars Nathan! Any chance of week or day views at some point in the future?
I’ll be looking to integrate them into our calendar for the Web-Empowered Church project (an open source project building on the TYPO3 CMS).
#9 Nathan Smith
Graham: Correct. I was trying to think of some off-the-wall skin I could do, and pink just seemed like a good idea.
Kyle: You’re right, Jason has some very nice work. I’m going to send him an email and ask if he could possibly develop a CMS for my templates.
Jeff: That’s cool, I’ve heard of the Web-Empowered Church project, from Chuck Russell. He’s an alumnus of Asbury Seminary, where I’m just about done with an MDiv. You can use these templates for whatever you like, but it won’t be until I get help with a calendar CMS that it would have week / day views. If you know anyone who wants to help, please let me / them know!
#10 Nathan Logan
Good work, Nathan (which I told you before, when I got the sneak preview).
=)
And once my plate clears up just a little bit (my uncle is breathing down my neck to get the admin for his site finished up), I should be able to work with you to put something together. I am thinking of an Ajax-based solution that could be really, really cool.
#11 Nathan Smith
Nathan (L): That’s awesome, glad to hear it! Take your time, no rush or anything. That’d be sweet if we could hammer out a good admin system, and then the Web Empowered Church project could pick it up and run with it from there. I’ve got a few other side jobs to keep me busy until then.
#12 Mike Montgomery
Looks good so far, though I think editing raw markup is beyond the technical abilities of our current church staff.
What would it take to make it a TxP plugin?
#13 Nathan Smith
It would only take a few hours of a skilled developer's time, methinks. :)
#14 Cindy
Wow, this calendar is great. I changed the color sceme a bit and am using it for my site. I made 7 templates, one for each day of the week that starts a month. This way, as I go, I don’t have to mess with filling in numbers each new month. I just select the template that matches my month.
One thing I’d love to be able to do is on rollover have a box that pops up (not a new window) to give more details about the posted event. I don’t know how to do that, or if there are any issues with using such a thing.
Anyway, thanks for the great layout!
#15 Nathan Smith
Cindy: That could easily be done with a JavaScript roll-over. I don’t make use of that technique a whole lot, but here’s a site that does, run by a few friends of mine: Particletree.com. Read more about how to do it here:
www.dyn-web.com/dhtml/tooltips
#16 Liam
I’m begining to tinker with the template for my dorm’s calendar. I used tooltips from walterzorn.com/tooltip/ and they validate and work well. A cms version would be awesome though. Anyway, thanks for the great service!
#17 Nathan Smith
Liam: You’re welcome. I agree, a simple calendar CMS would rock. There are a few guys who have expressed interest, so hopefully we’ll see something happen with that in the future.
#18 Mike
Nathan: I’m having problems with the download link. Is the link broke?
#19 Nathan Smith
Mike: It’s fixed now. I was using Textpattern’s internal download monitor to serve up the Zip files, but it appears to be having some trouble. So, I’ve just linked directly to the file to download instead. Sorry about that. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, because I didn’t realize anything was wrong.