NiftyCal is a Ruby on Rails plugin that is designed to make viewing a calendar easy within your application. The motivation behind this is that I couldn’t find a calendar solution that suited my needs so I figured, what the hell, I’ll just dive in and make my own. While creating this I had a few things in mind:
* There should be an easy way to just display a calendar * The user should be able to accept the default days or specify there own start and end dates. * Every aspect of the calendars css class selectors should be customizable.
With these things in mind I set out to create what I believe is the best calendar solution ( mainly because I created it :^d ).
To install NiftyCall run this command from your application root:
script/plugin install git://github.com/tschmidt/nifty_cal.git
If you are using older versions of rails you will need to download and install the plugin into the vendor/plugins path of your application.
The first thing that you will need to do is run the NiftyCal generator. This will create a stylesheet called “modern.css” in the ‘stylesheets/nifty_cal’ directory. Once you have run this and confirmed that the css file exists you will need to add the stylesheet to you application by adding this to the head of your application:
<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'nifty_cal/modern' %>
At this point you have several options. You can insert a very basic calendar that will start at the beginning of the month and continue to the end of the month by inserting
<%= display_calendar %>
somewhere in your view. You can also specify certain options that will affect the look of the calendar. For example, lets say that you only wanted to display the next 2 weeks. You would add this to your view:
<%= display_calendar :start_date => Date.today, :end_date => 2.weeks.from_now(Date.today) %>
This will display a calendar starting on today’s date and ending 2 weeks from today. Now let’s get crazy. Let’s say that we have an application that stores events. We want to display these events on a calendar that will let us know what is coming up. To do this the display_calendar() mehtod accepts a block. So lets assume that we have an instance variable called @events. Do display them on the calendar we would do something like this:
<%= display_calendar do |day|
if @events.collect(&:date).include?(day)
@events.each do |event|
"<p>#{event.title}</p>" if event.date == day
end
end
end %>
That’s all there is too it. Play around, get crazy, view the wiki for more information or to see all the options you have available to you. Feedback is always welcome.