Development Seed Blog

Handle Your Content More Intelligently

There are smarter ways to handle your events than with a classic calendar on groupwise. We recently installed the MIT Timeline module for CommNET, a staff intranet at The World Bank that helps its geographically disperse teams communicate better. Here is a screencast by Ric Castro, the site's lead architect, that shows how he uses Timeline to nicely handle multi-day events and run quick filters. Here at Development Seed Jeff has been working on this module a lot and is maintaining it for Drupal 5.

 
I was inspired to share more details about why we feel the timeline module is so helpful for teams after I received this email from Tim Herzog at World Resources Institute.
 
"We're having a real problem finding a calendar solution that can track upcoming stuff ranging from staff travel to internal and external events like pub launches, conventions, etc. Groupwise doesn't cut it. Do you have any open-source suggestions?"

The folks at WRI are big Drupal fans with five sites running on it right now, so I thought it would be good to bring up how well Drupal works as an intranet and particularly how calendars in Drupal can be smart. When it comes to online presentation, the classic monthly calendar view is restrictive and is clearly designed for a two dimensional, hard copy world. Online you can show much more, like the overlap of events, simultaneous events, and the relationship between different events. And this additional information makes your events, and your calendar, more useful.
 
Ric and his CommNET team had the same issue as WRI. They needed a way to display stuff (meetings, conferences, due dates, etc.), wanted a central way to input it into their system, and wanted their system to segment their stuff for them (i.e. the stuff could have categories based on department and content). For example, if you are on the Africa section of the site, they wanted only events from Africa to appear, along with options to drill down further to see only media events in Africa. They also wanted to be able to extend where their events show up, aside from just this fancy calendar. They wanted geo tag them so they appear on maps, and they wanted RSS feeds so they could send them out to other sites. Drupal made it really easy to quickly extend the functionality of a normal event by adding attachments and allowing for commenting, voting, RSVPing, all through simple configurations or plug ins.
 
Drupal’s strong themeing is important here because events quickly become more that just a title on a day. For example, what if I want to add categories to events, like climate change or small business development? I could have the system color code them based on their categories. Now what if I wanted to assign departments to events? I could make another category in Drupal for different departments and have the departments’ icons or logos show up as a bullet next to the event. A lot can be done though good CSS to bring your events calendar to the next leve, whether it’s on a normal calendar layout or on Timeline.

But what if you want to dynamically filter all climate change events for the year, or quickly browse back a few years to see everything hosted by on team? Ah, this is why the classic calendar layout totally sucks, and where Timeline can help you handle events the way you want to.
 
Give it a test run and send Jeff any feature requests you have.