cgi-cal - A Web-Based Calendar Application

Background

cgi-cal is a simple online calendar program that uses the cal application for the hard work of creating the actual calendar layout.

Like a lot of households, keeping track of upcoming events and appointments has always been somewhat of a problem for us because of our various paper, PDA, and whiteboard calendars. I enjoy hacking on providing various intranet projects, and had been fiddling with the idea of an online calendar for a quite a while but was daunted by the prospect of creating a table representing a month in calendar format. Then one evening while mowing the lawn it occurred to me that I could use Perl to parse the output from my intranet server's command line cal application. So I set to work and by 3:30am the next morning cgi-cal was born.

The mowing finally got finished a couple days later...

Key Features

• Month layout is displayed (thanks to cal)
• The current day is displayed in red.
• Each days events are displayed in it's text box.
• The Month and Year can be selected from the drop-down menu at the top of the page.
• Users can jump backward or forward one month using the links at the top of the calendar.
• To save entries for the currently selected month click Change Entries at the bottom of the page.

 

Limitations

• By default this will only display options for years 2000 - 2020 since that's all I need, if you need more or are reading this page in the year 2019 the fix should be fairly straight forward.
• This is far from immune to multi-instance database trashing, some kind of file locking should be implemented if more than one user could be clicking the Change Entry button at the same time.

If you're looking for a more professional calendar system here are a few links that may be useful:

• Mozilla Lightning and Sunbird
• Chandler Project
• MacOS Forge Calendar Server
• Zimbra
• Scalix
• Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium
• Citadel

Downloading and Installing

cgi-cal should work on your favorite Un*x system with a CGI-Enabled web server, Perl, the CGI Perl module, and some version of either cal or gcal.

It should also work on Win32 systems if you use Cygwin's CygUtils Package and Active State's ActivePerl.

The database is really just a semicolon delimited text file, to set it up you'll simply need to create a blank text file and make sure the security is set correctly so your web server can write to it. File locations are all specified in the first few lines of the script.

Enjoy, just remember where it came from. :-)

• cgi-cal - version 2.1
• cgi-cal-v1 - version 1.1 - older version before daily text-boxes.

Legal Mumbo-Jumbo

Feel free to download and use this software as you wish. This software has been tested, but I am not responsible for anything that occurs to your computer.

Use at your own risk, yada, yada, yada.

Last Updated: 12/3/2005 - Anthony Anderberg - ant@anderbergfamily.net