PHP Navigational Calendar

I'm working on a project for Edúcate Ya that involves placing a calendar on the home page. The idea is that the calendar will be used to display any public events, classes, guided trips, fund raiser events, and anything else of importance that an organization may want to advertise on a web page.

NavCalendar Application - Navigational Calendar

Each event listed on the calendar would be a hyper link to another page on the website that provides more details about the event. I ran a few Google searches to see if I could find something that would fit. There are of course plenty of HTML, JavaScript, and many other types of Calendars to choose from. However, everything I found either was way more than what I was looking for, cost money, or did not have the navigational feature I was looking for.

Many of the calendars were similar to a web-based Microsoft Outlook, which an organization could use to help employees manage group schedules. Not only did these calendars have way too many features, but also they weren't the features we were looking for.

So, I decided to build a Calendar using PHP. I chose PHP because the Edúcate Ya website was built with PHP, so the server is already configured to use PHP. I started working on this towards the end of August. Yesterday, I was able to generate -- using PHP -- a calendar with a list of events that were pulled from an XML data file.

I chose XML because the list of events for Edúcate Ya is small. However, my plan is to retrofit the application with an abstract class that will allow developers to add different data sources, such as a database. I also designed the system so that a front-end controller loads a "view" based on a parameter passed when calling the controller. Anyone who wishes to use this application could simply replace the view with their own by using the API.

The back end functionality is somewhat in place. The implementation doesn't yet fit the architecture, but I wanted to get this to market for Edúcate Ya as soon as possible. So, as many software development projects go, I took some shortcuts. The abstract class representing the data sources is still visible only on paper, and the APIs required to build the view are somewhat tightly coupled. It's not perfect, but it works for me right now.

The actual HTML and CSS need some major overhauling. That is the next step in this process. However, my hope is that the Navigational Calendar may turn out to be useful to others who wish to have a Navigational Calendar on their website. In order to realize this goal, the final step will involve making it easier to build a view. Currently, a developer would have to first build a static HTML calendar, and then integrate it with the HTML-generating PHP code so that the correct month is displayed with the correct data. This also means that I will need to throughly document everything, which is something that I haven't done much of outside of my full-time employment.

I plan to use the open source cross-platform software Gimp to apply the "chrome" for the calendar.