Sports Club Events Calendar
Help Page

Dear sportsmen and -women,

as you may have already found out yourselves, gathering enough participants for playing or training is sometimes rather cumbersome, especially if someone needs to send invitations to all members and collect their replies, read them, count the number of participants, and send out more messages in order to let everybody know whether the training or playing session will actually take place.

Things usually worsen when that single person falls ill or is on vacation.

Therefore it may be better to set up a web page instead for the purpose of administrating all sports events as well as the list of people willing to participate.

To use this web page, please do the following:

First of all, bookmark the page http://sb.fluomedia.org/demo/

For privacy reasons, you will need to log in (except in the demo version).

I) HOW TO NAVIGATE TO THE DESIRED DATE

See the two month calendars at the top of the page. The left one always shows the "current" month, i.e., either the month of the current date when the page is opened for the first time, or the currently selected month. The right one always shows the month following the left one.

Below them are two buttons, labeled "<<<" and ">>>". You can use these buttons to select a different month, before or after the currently selected month, respectively.

The numbers inside the calendars are clickable. Clicking on one of them will select the corresponding date. This will be reflected in the (bold) header below the two calendars. The selected date will also be marked in red in the left calendar and will not be clickable anymore.

The bottom part of the web page always refers to this selected date.

Note that the (clickable) numbers in the calendar will be shown in boldface if their corresponding dates contain at least one event.

II) HOW TO ANNOUNCE EVENTS

Note that Monday and Wednesday trainings (at the usual training hours) are hard-coded into the web page and do not need to be entered manually.

1) How to enter an event

Please go to the bottom of the page, enter the announcement of the event into the text input field above the button "Add new event", along with times, possibly an address (if it is an event outside of the office) and any other additional information that may be needed or useful. Then click on the button "Add new event". Voilà.

2) How to delete an event

Simply click on the button "Delete this event" below the text area showing the event's description.

However, beware that this will delete the whole event without any further warning!

This will also cause the list of people willing to participate (if any are present already) to be irrevocably lost!

3) How to edit an event

In order to keep the script simple, there is no "edit" button.

So in case you want to change the description of an event, you will have to first mark the text with your mouse and to copy the text with Ctrl-C. Then click on the button "Delete this event".

Enter the saved text into the text input field at the bottom of the page with Ctrl-V, make your changes, and submit by clicking on "Add new event".

It may also be advisable under certain circumstances to first create the new event, and then to delete the original one.

In special situations it may then also be desirable to copy the list of participants (see further below for how to add participants to an event) before deleting the original event.

However, this should only be done in exceptional cases, since participants should be given the opportunity to decide for themselves if they want to participate in the modified event.

It may also be advisable to notify already registered and any other prospective participants of the change by email (see further below for more on that).

4) How to change a (hard-coded) training event

In case this is a permanent change, please contact me, so that I can change the hard-coded training events accordingly.

In case of a one-time change, please proceed as follows:

Note that since the hard-coded training events cannot be deleted, clicking on the button "Delete this event" will only erase the list of participants.

Therefore, please add a new event (see above for how to do that) which contains the necessary changes (e.g. the exact location if it is going to take place outside of the office, or with a different time range if the time changes).

Please add a notice to the original event that it has been cancelled (see immediately below for how to do that).

5) How to cancel an event (e.g. for lack of enough participants)

Please add a notice to the event in question to the effect that it has been cancelled. Use the field and button "Add participant" for that (see below for how to do this).

Please do NOT simply delete the event, since people might be wondering what happened (and this might trigger an avalanche of confused emails).

6) How to inform about events

It may also be helpful to announce new events (or changes to an event) via email (or through an invitation e.g. via Outlook, Lotus Notes etc., so that people can additionally transfer the event to their calendar and get automatic reminders).

It may be helpful to provide a link in the corresponding email to the event in question on the web page.

In order to provide this link, you can:

-  either click on the button "Update"
    at the top of the web page, after
    entering the event, and then copy
    and paste the link from your browser's
    URL window (at the top),

-  or compose the link manually.
    Its structure is as follows:

   http://sb.fluomedia.org/demo/?y=<year>&m=<month>&d=<day>

   (optionally followed by &l=<language>),
    where you have to substitute the year
    number for "<year>", the month number
   for "<month>", and the day number for
    "<day>" (<language> can be any number
    from 1 to 6).

In case there are several events on the same date, it may be useful to provide the event's number (shown always to the left of an event) at the end of the above link (in the form "#<event number>"), for greater convenience, and in the text of your email, for easier reference.

Example: http://sb.fluomedia.org/demo/?y=2006&m=2&d=22#3

III) HOW TO REGISTER AS A PARTICIPANT

1) How to register yourself

Locate the event your want to participate in (see above for how to navigate to a desired date).

a) If you are a frequent player, you can have your name included in the drop-down list next to the button "Add frequent player" near the bottom of the chosen event (please contact me if your name is missing!). This saves you some typing.

Just select your name from the list, and click on the button "Add frequent player" next to it. That's all!

b) If you are not registered (yet), please enter your name into the text input field at the bottom of the chosen event, and click on the button "Add participant" next to it.

Note that this latter function should also be used to add any comments, questions or cancellation notifications to an event.

2) How to desist after registration

Just click on the button "Remove this participant" to the right of your name.

This can also be used to remove any comments, questions or notifications from an event.

IV) ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

1) Past events are kept for 30 days. After 30 days, an event will be erased completely automatically.

2) There is a timeout of 2 minutes between displaying a page and clicking on a button to add or delete some data (the buttons and links for navigating dates and for choosing a language are not affected). After that time commands to change data will simply be ignored and must be repeated (use the "Update" button at the top of the page to reset this timeout).

The reason for this is that the web browser may resend a command when you use the "Back" (and/or the "Forward") button of your browser, which might otherwise result in scrambled or lost data.

V) PLEASE START USING THIS WEB PAGE FROM TODAY ON

If you want to play a bit with the script, in order to familiarise yourself with it, please go to some yet unused date. Please also clean up after yourself (delete all events you entered).

Most importantly:

I hope you'll enjoy using this web page!

Please report any errors, glitches, comments, suggestions or wishes to me. Thank you!

Yours,
Steffen
--
   Steffen Beyer <sb@fluomedia.org>
   http://sb.fluomedia.org/whoami/ (Who am I)
   http://sb.fluomedia.org/gallery/ (Fotos Brasil, USA, ...)
   http://sb.fluomedia.org/download/ (Free Perl and C Software)