We need a better way of seeing that there are multiple events on a given day. Right now it's extremely easy to miss events because they're obscured by an earlier event. My guild has actually changed our event structure because we could never get people for Gruul events since they were always obscured by Karazhan events on the calendar. For example, if I have an event color coded to green that occurs at 5 PM and an event color coded to red that occurs at 8 PM, all I'll see is a green block. There's no way to tell that a red event occurs short of mousing over the day. I shouldn't have to mouse over a month's worth of events to see what's going on.

Here are two possible solutions:

1) Subdivide each day block on the calendar so it shows multiple colors. You could divide it into stripes (horizontal or vertical) for 2 events on the same day. You could take it a step further and do stripes for 2 events and blocks for 3-4 events. (I have yet to see a guild that commonly has more than 4 events scheduled on the same day, so this satisfy the majority.)

Example A (2 events): I have 2 events, red and green. Red occurs at 5 PM; green occurs at 8 PM. This calendar day would appear with the upper half as red and the lower half as green.

Example B (4 events, blocks): I have 4 events, red (2 PM), green (5 PM), yellow (7 PM), and blue (9 PM). This calendar would appear with the upper left corner as red, upper right as green, lower right as yellow, and lower left as blue.

Example C (4 events, stripes): Same events as example B. This calendar day would appear with a stripe of red at the top, a stripe of green below or to the right, a stripe of yellow below or the right, and a stripe of blue below or to the right. (I don't prefer this, but it may be easier to implement.)

2) Define a configurable priority system for events. This allows administrators to say "category A is red and has priority 2; category B is green and has priority 1." Whichever event has the highest priority "wins" and that color is displayed on the calendar.

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I think #1 is much more useful, but #2 might be significantly easier depending on your database setup (or hideously worse -- I dunno).

I'll throw out solution #3.
Provide a calendar view option for a Weekly view like say Outlook.
Where it shows each day and shows the events in a different box under the heading for that day. This could be just an additional schedule vies that would open up when the day is clicked and open in the <!--System Content--> area of the page. Or it could be an abstract of the calendar vies that would appear below the calendar and show either the events for that day or the events or each of the week for the current day and the next 6 days. I say a weekly view because I have found that even though Guild Leadership will usually plan things out over a month at a time the average player usually only plans a week ahead. A weekly view could look something like the following:
For this example I'll say that the color format for the raid heading is as keyed as Karazhan;Gruul's Lair;Tempest Keep

7/12	7/13	7/14	7/15	7/16	7/18	7/19
5pm		5pm		5pm
	9pm			9pm

That could work as something below the calendar. I don't think it would work embedded within the day view of a calendar because people still have to click on the day to find out what's going on.

Thats exactly what I mean. An optional view to use as a menu below the main calendar to show the current day + 6 for a weeks worth of expanded scheduling.

If Chops (1) sees value in this and (2) goes with that particular solution, it would be nice to have scroll arrows so you can somehow modify which 7 days are shown.

I kinda like the 7-day summary thinger too.

That would be neat too so you could advance or go back 7 days at a time.

Here's some (large scale!) views of what I suggested. My person preference is the grid (last one).

Two events:


Three events:


Three events (horizontal):


Four events (grid):

Perhaps Chops could just make a pre-defined "multi-event" box for those days that have more than one event scheduled. Then they could see there's more than one thing scheduled, but will have to mouse-over the date to see what the events are?

Yea honestly most of my guildies don't really need a whole month up there at a time... or even two.

I guess some of you needed to plan out two months in advance but I turned that back off.

I'd definitely vote for just showing a sliding 7 days that shows more detail per day.

Well the whole 2 month thing came from the fact that the month often ends in the middle of the week. Most people don't pan forward to see the next month so they don't sign up for events that happen on Friday or Saturday in the same week but at the beginning of the next month because they never look ahead to see them.

I really like these ideas but have (of course) my own personal take.

Perhaps clicking on the headder of the month could bring up a detailed calendar view in the center (or whatever you use) display window which would display times and titles in order on each day.

I still like the full month(or two) overview on the home page as this helps when planning my own life several weeks in advance.

The striped approach is very cool if you could get it to work or even texture change that could be pre defined for multiple raids on a day. Since the boxes are so small and the area limited in size the boxes might be going a littl too far. Just a visual indicator that there is more than one raid on the day in question should prompt a mousover!!!

That's a good point about the boxes. Maybe there could indicators for one event, two events, and more than two events? What with three KZ groups going all the time, it's the norm to have two events on the same day.

Ugh, I just noticed: days are not colored by the first event that occurs on those days. Each day is colored by the first event to be added to the calendar on that day. That's practically random.

Chops, any chance of improving this feature to make it more useful? Pretty please?

Since we are just getting ready to add a second Karazhan group to the raid schedule and there will be days of overlap it would be really nice if we were able to have those multiple event days stand out more in one of the ways suggested.

However it is done please keep the option to show the full 2 months because we decide on our raid content for the next month at an officer meeting in the current month and post it for the next month well in advance.

We have a lot of people that need to be able to pick and choose raids in advance due to RL stuff.

Some comments :

I think something more simple like a blinking box for days with multiple events on it would work best. I mean if you have 5 events on a day ... that box is just not gonna work with 5 different color stripes on it.

Beyond that though, the ability to goto an actual calendar page is something I have missed a lot since using other schedulers. How crazy you go with that calendar page as far as being able to view by year or month or week or day ... I'll leave up to you. Weekly and Monthly would seem to be ideal.

Dear lord no. Our entire calendar would be one huge blinking block.

Check it out: http://hawt.dkpsystem.com/forum.php

Yea no bliking anything that would irritate me and most people I know.

But, I do like both the suggestion for a 7 day summory below the calendar. And the one that I would really perfer to see is an option to click the calendar and have it display a substatially larger view in the main content area and then each day could have a list of all scheduled event. I have been think about how to do that on my own but have yet to hit apon a way to code it to work with the current calendar system.

Now if Chops gets the notion to do it, he could set up both and let each guild decide which they would prefer or even if they want have both running.

So maybe the right solution to this problem is as follows:

• Keep the existing calendar mostly as is except for the coloring. This would be the "macro view". Days would either have no color (to indicate no events) or a color (to indicate one or more events). The calendar would only show one color over all days and it could be part of the site layout. So if I choose a canned layout that consists of mostly blue, the "events on that calendar day" color would be blue. Hovering and clicking on a single day could be retained as is.
• Add a new "detail view" that shows you something like a traditional calendar detail view. This would be a one month view that shows all of the details. This view would open in a separate window.

I did some looking around and most calendaring systems use either a detail view or a combination of the macro and detail views (Outlook is a great example of this). For the detail view, you could display each event with an area that corresponds to its size as in this image. However, that might not work so hot for a month view, so you could simply do an entry on each day regardless of event length. An example of that is here (PDF): full day events are a stripe across the day while timed events are just noted as <category color><time><event name>.

I think I like this better than my original striping request because it gives you a much better view of things.

Well isn't that a coincidence: today Joyent announced their Connector product is being released under open source (GPL v2 specifically). Connector is a web based collaboration suite that includes a calendaring system.

Open source announcement
Screen shots (scroll down for calendar views)