I’ve just installed the most recent version of Calendaring and ATContentTypes (both in the collective), and have to say it is very slick what you can do with this product. I can do the following using iCal and Plone:

• Create a calendar in iCal and publish it to a Plone site via WebDAV. The events appear in the calendar view and as normal Event objects
• I can add a new event in iCal and when I refresh the calendar, it sends the new event to the Plone site. It’s smart enough to know that if I edit an existing event to update the event instead of duplicating it. This must be because each event has a unique ID.
• Using iCal, I can subscribe to a calendar that is being hosted on a Plone site. This can be done by clicking on the Event icon when you are viewing the calendar, which launches iCal and auto-subscribes. This works better in Safari than in Firefox. Firefox wants you to download the .ics file first, after which you would double-click on it to open
  it up in iCal. A workaround for this would be to change the http:// to webcal:// which would tell Firefox to use another program (i.e. iCal) to handle the file. (DONE)
• I can add an event in the Plone interface and in iCal do a refresh of the subscribed calendar. The event that I just added in Plone will now appear on my iCal calendar. I can also set it to auto-refresh every 15 min. This means that the artist’s fans don’t have to keep clicking on refresh, nor do they even have to visit the artist’s website. All they have to do is launch their iCal program and it will automatically grabs all the most recent event postings from the artist’s calendar hosted on the Plone site.

What is missing:

• There is no two-way synchonization. That is, if I publish a calendar from iCal, and then add an event to that calendar in Plone, it won’t be synchronized back to the iCal calendar that I have published. You can certainly add events both in the Plone site and via iCal, and those who have subscribed to the calendar will see these events (no matter where they were entered), but the person who published the calendar will not see the events. A simple workaround is simply to subscribe to the same calendar that you have published, and use that one to view ALL the events (incl. the ones that are posted from the Plone site).
• Recurring events don’t work in Plone. If you make a recurring event in iCal, it will show up as a single event in Plone. UPDATE: See this post in which Tom Hoffman mentions that Programmers of Vilnius will be adding recurring events functionality as part of a contract job.
• Filtering the events by the event type / keywords. The CalendarX product does this, so I don’t think it would be too difficult to add to Calendaring.
• Nesting the calendars. For example, an artist is in several bands and if you subscribe to a single band calendar then you only see the events of that particular band, but you can also subscribe to the artists’s calendar which will show you the events from all the bands that the artist is in. UPDATE: See Jeff Kowalczyk’s post regarding this.

You can read about my findings trying to find a good solution for uploading audio files from iTunes into Zope via WebDAV.

Yesterday, I gave CalendarX a
run-through and exchanged a few emails with +lupa+, the author. Right
now, what I’m thinking of is using CalendarX as the sitewide calendar
because it allows for filtering of events by keyword (concerts, jam
sessions, festivals, workshops, etc.) and then use Calendaring for the
individual artist and band calendars, since they don’t necessarily need
the filtering features, but the iCal integration is very important.

I’m not too keen on having to support two calendar solutions, but since
only the site administrator needs to know CalendarX, it shouldn’t be
too bad. The event objects are persistent so even if another better
calendar solution comes along, or these three merge, the objects will
still be accessible.

PloneiCalendar is a product from Ingeniweb. Read my summary of PloneiCalendar posted to the Calendar team group space area.

You can read more about PloneiCalendar on Ingeniweb’s sourceforge page.

I submitted some bugs to the Calendaring tracker
mostly having to do with things messing up when publishing from iCal.
Not sure how much of it is the fault of iCal (in which case we have to
cross our fingers that bug reports submitted to Apple are taken
seriously), or the way Calendaring (and the SchoolTool iCal component)
handles the parsing of these files.

I’m going to check out PloneiCalendar
which also uses the SchoolTool iCal stuff to see if it exhibits the
same problems. That will hopefully help to find out who’s the culprit.

I’m still having problems with the Kupu drawer which doesn’t seem to want to display the other objects that I’ve added to the site. I sent Godefroid (gotcha) a mail about this.

As Sidnei has done with Calendaring, I need to remind Godefroid to make a collector for CompositePack.

It seems as though this product will still not be something for artists to use, but limited to the webmaster of the site. I think it’s too complex for the average user. But perhaps with some pre-defined viewlets and tweaking the interface it can be made more end-user-friendly.

Calendaring gives you tight integration with iCal, so you can publish and subscribe to calendars that are hosted in a Plone site. This is an incredibly useful tool for artists and fans to communicate about the upcoming gigs.

I got an error message when clicking on the ‘Day’ view and reported this bug to the newly created collector. (Thanks Sidnei 😉

I posted a short report on my experiences in installing Calendaring in the Calendar Team area.

I checked out the product from Infrae’s SVN repository:

svn co http://codespeak.net/svn/rr/PloneRailroadVideoLibrary/trunk PloneRailroadVideoLibrary

Kit Blake from Infrae gave a talk about Railroad at the Plone conference in Vienna,but
unfortunately I was unable to attend because it was at the same time
that I was giving a lightning talk about Plone4Artists in the other
room. However, I sat down with Kit later to have a closer look at
Railroad. We quickly discovered that Railroad has some pretty demanding
dependencies, and the documentation on how to get it all set up is
sparse.

Fortunately, Jan Wijbrand Kolman had gotten it all set up on Kit’s Mac
laptop for demo purposes, and was available on IRC to assist me (“jw”
on #railroad).

• install apache2 using fink
• install python 2.3.3 using fink
• download and install mod_python

(my pc)     ./configure –with-apxs2=/sw/bin/apxs –with-python=/sw/bin/python
(kit’s pc)    ./configure –prefix=/sw –with-python=/sw/bin/python2.3

• enable mod_python, mod_dav, mod_davfs in /sw/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Now don’t forget to edit your main config and add
    LoadModule python_module /sw/lib/apache2/modules/mod_python.so
and if your configuration uses ClearModuleList, then also
    AddModule mod_python.c

• install the pydavclient

cd /usr/local/src/pydavclient
sudo /sw/bin/python2.3 setup.py install

• install libxml2 using fink

or http://www.zveno.com.au/download/combo-2004-09-02.dmg.gz

resources: http://jamesclarke.info/notes/InstallLibxml2

ftp ftp://ftp.xmlsoft.org/old/libxml2-2.6.7.tar.gz
tar xvfz libxml2-2.6.7.tar.gz
cd libxml2-2.6.7
./configure –prefix=/sw –with-python=/sw/bin/python2.3