If you have followed us over the last six months, you know we're nuts about Blender news. In fact, we have a 'mission statement' that tells us that we publish daily news and nothing more. We're not interested in adding forums, user galleries, private messages or other cool community features - we'll leave that to the community sites. And once they do, we'll tell you about it here!
We did however find that we regularly publish about contests, user meetings or other events that have their moment of fame here but once the moment arrives most people have forgotten about them. So we decided we needed an easy to use calendar that shows you the upcoming events in a way that is nicely integrated with the rest of the website.
On the homepage you'll now find up to four upcoming events. Click on the event title to read more about it, or on the title of the block to see all the events of the current month. Once you're in the event pages you'll see a calendar appear in the sidebar. You can use this to navigate to other months. Dates with events are highlighted and when you hover over them you'll see some short information.
From these pages you can also add the Calendar automatically to your iCal or Mozilla Sunbird (see the link under the calendar) and always be up to date.
Of course, we pretend to be just as cool as Google so we labeled the Calendar 'Beta' for now. This means we can tinker with it without warning ;-)
If you have something that should be on our calendar, you know how to reach us. If there's something you don't like about the calendar, or you have suggestions to improve it please let a comment below.
Enjoy!
The BlenderNation team.
12 Comments
This is an absolutely fantastic addition to the site. Brilliant.
why is the number 7 ringed all the time - shouldn't the current day be ringed(the one being viewed)? - epat
ah - worked out why the number seven - it's the 7th today! I think that's just a little bit confusing though(I was confused) maybe if it was underlined in green and the day being viewed was ringed instead... but that's just a suggestion! - epat
Sounds like a good idea. It would be really cool if we could get the projected release dates for official blender versions.
Well, it's a great a ide.
I hope u can make a script for put in other blender community websites.... like the 'support us'.
A was a bit confused about the current date being boxed, too. I clicked on it, thinking it might be a link to an event. I echo Matt's suggestion about using a more subtle marker for the date. Maybe something like a very light color behind the current date?
Good job. Now I may finally have a reason to use iCal (that is, if I haven't...ahem...deleted it from my hard drive).
pell
Thanks for the feedback; I have changed the layout to the following: the current day is underlined, while the event days are in blue/bold. Is that better? Unfortunately there's no option to highlight the selected day (the one that you are currently viewing). If I have some time left soon (yeah right! :), I'll see if I can hack that in.
interesting addition indeed! I'm curious whether you build the calendar thingy from scratch or did you base it on an existing open source library? I like the direct iCal link!
This new layout makes much more visual sense to me. This is going to be very useful!
@mattie: I used an existing WordPress plugin: http://blog.firetree.net/2005/07/18/eventcalendar-30/
Pretty straightforward actually; the biggest problem was how to integrate it into the homepage in such a way that it still left enough space for the 'latest comments' and 'version tracker' lists.
thanks for the tip!