Sitecore Calendar Module Thoughts

I recently got to play around with the Sitecore Calendar Module for the first time and thought I’d share my thoughts about it here.  My first impression was pretty good, as there was clear documentation about what the module offered and I was happy to see that it specifically had the view that I was interested in (the Agenda View).  I was also impressed by the amount of views it offered, as well as the editing capabilities, even though I didn’t really want to use those capabilities for my project.  The installation of the module is very easy, as it’s just a package to install in Sitecore the Desktop like any other package.

Once the installation is done, I found the documentation helpful for getting some sample events created within the desktop.  The module offers a good hierarchy for creating events and all the necessary prerequisite templates to do so.  One gotcha that I found was that I immediately created 12 months under a year, naming them “January”, “February”, etc, because my preference was to see the months spelled out.  After that was done, I created a day folder (14) under January, and then created an event that I set to occur on January 14^th – only to see my save action move my newly created event to an (auto created) 01/14 directory structure.   So, I deleted all of my folders and recreated them using the numbers for the month rather than the name.

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I like that the calendar module allows developers to set up different settings items and alternate “views” based on each of the default views – this was a must for my requirements.  I also appreciate that one of the configurable options was to limit the events that would show on a view, which allows multi-site implementations on Sitecore to be handled gracefully.  I find that having a button specifically for Calendar module presentation on the ribbon is convenient, but also a little ambiguous since it varies from the normal presentation details that Sitecore users are already used to.  I say ambiguous because those normal presentation detail methods of adding sublayouts and renderings can still be used for Calendar Module controls.  I also had some issues with the options there.  It seemed that if I specifically chose a “Settings Item” (IE: specific view) that differed from my “Module Settings” value for that view, the Module Settings overrode my page specific setting.  This is the opposite of what I’d expect to happen, and makes me question why the “Settings Item” selection is even necessary.

One other thing that I had some issues with was the styling of the controls.  I’m a little on the particular side when it comes to how everything looks, and while the Calendar module does come with a number of default color themes, none fit perfectly into my site design.  My first thought was adding my own custom theme to the module, which is possible, however when I saw the very little amount of styling’s that were in the actual theme CSS sheets, I was a little disheartened.  Most of the styles for the views are actually in CSS that is not “themed”.  So, in order to appease my pickiness, I ended up adjusting those style sheets directly for my site.  It wasn’t that hard, though there’s a lot of styles to have to go through for that.  One last thing that caught me off guard though, was that the calendar module doesn’t give you the actual renderings presentation code it outputs.  It seems that it is all locked away in the DLL, which makes customization of the output HTML pretty much impossible.  I would’ve preferred a way to modify that output HTML directly to fit my needs.

Overall, I would recommend the Sitecore Calendar Module to clients who need calendar functionality on their site.  I think it speeds up development time as opposed to coding all of this functionality from scratch, and has a good amount of options for custom configuration.  I would caution those who are ultra-picky about look that it may take some trial and error messing with CSS files to get the output that’s perfect for your Sitecore site though!