[Phpgroupware-developers] group/team scheduling

[Stephan Cremer]

Hello list,

after checking out several collaboration applications supporting some
sort of team scheduling features, I decided to take a closer look at
phpgroupware and its calendar module. I first installed version
0.9.14-RC3 which was straightforward so I could start hacking in some
users and appointments right away. 

I then played with it a little and added a function that would give me
an additional view similar to and based on the function "planner" in
class "uicalendar", sorted by user instead of category.
During my work I noticed that there are still quite a few bugs in the
software. Here are some of them that I remember regarding the planner
view:

- the ACL mechanism (granting access) does not work correctly, e.g.
  granting access to a group does not have the desired effect.
- events scheduled accross months (e.g.: Aug. 30th - Sep. 2nd) 
  are not shown correctly.
- events scheduled over more than a month (e.g.: Aug 1st - Dec 15th)
  are not shown correctly
- events repeating on a daily basis show up as one non-repeating event
  lasting for one day
- colouring of events according to their category does not work
  I added an optional field "cat_color" to the table "phpgw_categories"
  and extended the category definition form with a color text field to
  make it work, but what happens if an event is associated with more
  than one category?

After looking into things a bit, I figured that there must have been a
lot of changes since RC3 and decided to check out the HEAD revision from
CVS. Unfortunately, I did not manage to get past the setup procedure:

---------- snip ----------
phpGroupWare version 0.9.15.003 Setup III     
Template Error: loadfile: B_single_domain is not a valid handle.
Halted.
Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in 
<PATH_TO_phpgroupware>/phpgwapi/inc/class.Template.inc.php on line 484
---------- snip ----------

I then had a similar experience trying to get RC4 to work - The setup
was fine but then the application permanently runs into a network
timeout...

---------- snip ----------
Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid File-Handle resource in
/usr/local/httpd/htdocs/phpgroupware/phpgwapi/inc/class.network.inc.php
on line 81
---------- snip ----------

I tested on two machines with the following SuSE/PHP4 combinations:
  1. SuSE 6.4 with PHP 4.2.2 (self compiled Apache with modules)
  2. SuSE 8.0 with PHP 4.1.0 (as is shipped with the distribution)


I am interested in starting to use the phpgroupware application
framework in general and would like to start with the calendar module
for group/team scheduling with a planner view sorted by user as
indicated above. I am therefore also willing to contribute. Now I was
wondering if anyone could give me some hints regarding the following
question:
Which branch should I base my work on? I would think that the most
natural place would be the HEAD branch since I would expect most of the
enhancements, new features and bugfixes there. But... how do I get it to
run? In other words can anyone help me getting past the setup procedure?


Any comments, questions and help on what I am planning to do would be
greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
Stephan Cremer.