In What shall we do with the school year term dates, I discussed how I think for people who need to know the school term dates, the way they're presented on many council websites is less helpful than it could be, and my suggestion of what I think is a better way to present them.
I also suggested what would be really helpful for users would be the inclusion of calendar files on the School Term Dates page that users could download to import into whatever calendar system they like to use, rather than them having to type that information in manually. I also suggested what would be really helpful would be for web content management systems in wide use in local government to have some kind of specific School Term Dates Content Type to make managing this much easier for content editors; I hope to one day have a crack at making one for both Jadu and LocalGovDrupal at some point, but if somebody else beats me to it, my idea is Open Source.
And because the point of this site is to Show The Thing as well as for me to just Describe The Thing, I presented an example of what I think a School Term Dates page could look like.
Of course, it's not just school term dates pages which contain date-based information; there is, of course, Events - whether that's promoting the council's activities during National Fungus Week, Election Day, or consultation periods where not only will a user want to know the dates of the event in question, but they might want to add those dates to their calendar.
The obvious answer to all this is to add all these things to your Events module, but I think the obvious answer is a bad answer; not least because whilst some people who have certain 'specialist' interests might be as excited about Election Day as they are about National Fungus Week, it's - and please don't feel insulted by this - possible only a fraction of the county's residents will be equally excited by the consultation on the Improvements to the BigTown Town Centre CCTV Network, so I don't think it would represent good content design to clutter the fun things section with slightly less fun things.
There's also the matter that adding individual one-off events to the Events section works from the perspective of finding out when those things are happening, but when it comes to recurring events, whether the frequency of recurrence is regular like the fortnightly Thursday councillor drop-in session, or irregular like school term dates, as a user you probably are less interested in seeing a single date, and you’re more likely to be interested in seeing the complete set of dates relevant to that Thing, which is often difficult to surface with a CMS Events module.
Or there's what's got me thinking about this issue further...
...strike days!
Where I live, the bin men have been on strike, doing one, and then two day strikes on different days each week during the period of the strike.
There's a web page with a list of all the dates they're on strike - but for me, as a resident, that page is not particularly useful to me.
'Why is that, Simon?' I hear your personal internal dialogue ask.
Well, as a resident, I don't particularly care about all the dates the bin men are on strike, I only care about what dates they're on strike on my bin day. And just like being able to see the dates I'll need to ensure my child is looked after at home in the tool I use mostly for keeping track of dates - my calendar - I want to be able to add my bin strike days to my calendar, so that I know in advance how irritated I'm likely to be without having to go to the council website every week to check if this week is strike week.
So naturally I've Shown The Thing with my own version of a Latest information on the bins strikes page.
I don't feel as confident in being able to assert there should be a specific Content Type in a CMS for this kind of recurring date-related information as I do about asserting School Term Dates should be a distinct Content Type; the latter is a predictable format which is going to be the same across pretty much all councils, but this kind of information is probably less predictable to design a Content Type for. Or rather, you probably could design some form of generic date-related information Content Type, but for it to be sufficiently generic as to be applicable for all possible formats of date-related information, it would probably be a nightmare for a content editor to actually use. Content editors are users too, you know, who have feelings and needs, and if you prick them they will bleed. But if you think it's worth having a crack at designing and building something, by all means take this idea further.
What I will confidently assert at this point is that there is an established user need for the ability to create date-related content in a CMS and for the CMS to be able to generate on the fly a .ics calendar file for the user to download to import into their own calendar.
Again, if I can find time to have a crack at this I might see about making such a thing for the Jadu CMS, and when I finally manage to make time to learn how to make Drupal modules I'll try something similar for LocalGovDrupal. But again if you manage to find time ahead of me to build one then feel free, just tell your friends you got the idea from me, mkay?
What I have though been able to find time to do is to create a simple calendar file generator tool, which if you agree with this idea you can use to generate the files of bunches of events to add to your own site, without having to type the 'code' for the calendar file by hand.
It's a rough and ready first draft which I may or may not put some effort into refining, but the code is on GitHub for anybody who feels like laughing at my JavaScript and improving on it themselves.
