Week 8: Social Features Project

This week went by in doing more work with Calendars, such as sorting out the issue on the User Authorization for Google data apis.
Earlier in the week, I implemented the workflow of Calendars feature with fuctionality such as:

• creation/edit of events by users for chosen Calendars.
• the addition of org_admins userid's to the Access Control Lists of their org's Google Calendar
  
• sending notifications to Calendar owners with event request message and consequent approval by org_admin was also implemented.
• uplading of approved events into the respective Google Calendar
  

The latest is at my GAE. All users with user roles and user pages will be able to see the "Add Event", "Events" and "List Event" options. "Add Event" will result in a notification being sent to the respective owner of the Calendar for approval, hence one may not be able to see the event pop up directly on the respective Google Calendar.

After some discussions with my mentor, it was decided that it would be an acceptable trade-off to use the CalVis API to display Calendars. As there was no very definetive decision reached in the dev-list discussion, at the same time, there was also not a strong opposition to CalVis, my mentor and I decided to go with the CalVis. The UI of CalVis can be manipulated with CSS to a decent extent and hence, it can be designed to look better. Although it may never look as good as Google's :-(, it is a trade-off we get for having the cool Google Maps plus Youtube widget pop-up on Calvis. I am currently working on the CSS designs for the Calendars as well as the User Pages(i was supposed to have done this a while back!).

For the next week:

• prepare cool designs for the Calendars UI and User pages
• find out how and write cron jobs for keeping Melange-side and Google Calendar-side events in sync
• spend some time to refactor code to ensure it sticks to Melange styles and conventions