More Thought on Confluence Calendars

I've been thinking about my problem with confluence calendars from yesterday.

A cool way to implement this would be to use labels. If you wanted a page to show up in a calendar, you would label it with YYYYMMDD.

When the calendar rendered, it would search for all pages tagged with the label for each day and put a link to that page in the box.

Part of the per calendar configuration would be specifying which spaces and pages to look in. For example:


{garyCalendar:spaces:space1,space2|pages:space1.page1,space1.page2}


Child pages of specified pages would be search.

Now if I was competent in java, I could probably bang this out in a night :(

Confluence vs TWiki

When I first used confluence, I thought it was slow and obtrusive. I thought it had no where near the feature set of TWiki. I didn't know how to do a lot of the things I do in TWiki and WYSIWYG is never as powerful as markup (at least for how I use it).

Then getting non-techie people to use the wiki became my problem. It turns out that TWiki works best for sysadmins and programmers and not so much for artists, writers and business people.

I've figured out how to do a few things with Confluence and I'm really happy with it now. So far:

• I can create service journal pages for my servers
• I can use gliffy to draw diagrams
• I can attach xls files and edit them using Webdav

I still haven't tried to set up knowledge bases yet, but I don't see that being a huge problem. One of the nice things is that confluence has a concept of templates, which makes this easier than it was with TWiki.

The one problem I haven't solved is calendars. The calendar plugin really sucks compared to twiki. In Twiki, I can put a date onto a page and the calendar plugin automatically puts it into the right square for me. As far as I can tell, the confluence calendar plugin is only for ICS and only for well formated calendar events. Being able to map events to a visual calendar automatically is a very powerful tool.

I hope I'm wrong and that someone else has already solved my problem.