Easy Calendar Applications

One of the latest crazes on the ‘net has recently been online calendars.
with the MCAL library and PHP,
writing calendar applications is now
easy and fully functional. The MCAL library is very similar to the c-client IMAP
library. It offers a common simple interface for accessing calendars that can be stored in
many different formats, both local and remote formats are supported.

In this tutorial, we will use the mstore calendar driver. The mstore calendar driver uses
a local file storage format. Another driver that can be used is the ICAP driver,
which allows access to remote calendar stores.

One things that makes the MCAL library very different than other libraries is that it
does not just handle “simple” calendaring. It is a feature rich calendaring library that
handles dates from year 1 to year 9999, incorporating the Gregorian calendar and extrapolating
back. This calendaring obviously contains events and many event objects. (It essentially uses
icalendar objects and properties).

Some of MCAL’s supported object features are:

• Alarms (triggers) which can be set to go off any number of minutes before the event.
• Class values (Public/Private)
• Start and End Dates
• Recurrence (This event should re-occur every Thursday..etc..)
• Calendar sharing.

Enough about the capabilities, lets get coding!