Limitations and Known Problems

Updating

Automatic reimport of calendar base data does not happen, when the extension gets reinstalled. With traditional installations, you just can reimport data with the extension manager.

Calendars

The calendar plugin is based on the Gregorian Calendar, so it fits European countries well, but probably nothing else. It defaults to Sunday being the last day of the week, but it can be tweaked to accept Sunday as the first weekday.

There is no provision or intention to handle other calendar systems, e.g. the lunar calendar of Islam or the lunisolar Jewish calendar.

Holidays

I have little understanding of holidays outside my cultural bubble. Beside a lack of time, this lack of expertise keeps me from adding all the holiday lists I can find.

Just some examples for difficulties:

  • In Denmark there are two holidays that always happen on Sunday. In Germany, I would not include such days into a calendar.

  • In Bavaria, there is a holiday that is only valid in communities with a majority of catholic people. This can not be properly shown. In cases like this, you should add it to your site as an event or within a YAML file.

  • In Austria, not nation-wide holidays appear to be only valid for the public sector, but not for businesses. I tried to map this by calling these days partial instead of holiday.

  • In Germany, Dec. 24 and Dec. 31 have special rules for opening hours of stores, but these days are not holidays. I have not included them, though they might also be partials.

  • In the UK, holidays get shifted to the next Monday if they happen to fall on a weekend. I tried to map this by the shifting... field.

  • In the Czech Republic, there exist two kinds of holidays that apparently differ by the categories of stores that are allowed to open. I have flagged both kinds as holiday.

  • Also in the Czech Republic, there are official remarkable days that are apparently no holidays. I have not entered them.

  • In Belgium, there exist holidays for the Flemish part of the country, for the Walloon part, and for the German part. Unfortunately, the ISO 3166-2 region codes know only about the Flemish part, the Walloon part and the Brussels region. So for me, there is one region missing and one region that I do not know how to handle.

  • In Switzerland, there are at least four distinct levels of holidays, the level varying from region to region, and there are a lot of local holidays. Also it has to be taken into account, if a majority of the population is catholic. Oh, and some holidays should get canceled if it leads to Monday and Tuesday being a holiday, but this cancelling is not respected everywhere[1]. As a consequence, I feel not qualified to enter Swiss holidays correctly.

1

There is no special command for deleting a date. You can handle this if you build a shifting rule that changes the year (e.g. shifting: 'TU: 365').

Events

Recurring events within YAML files that span from the end of one year to the next will not show up in December and January. Please split them up.

There is no rule for shifting recurring events away from holidays.

Invisible Events

You will probably define Typo3 access rules for events. The calendar respects these rules according to the current date. So, if you have an event that is not visible any more (as it happened in the past or as you have deleted it), it will not be visible in the calendar, too. Of course, this applies also to future events.

YAML Trouble

I decided to use YAMl for user-generated events and holidays, because there is a YAML parser built into Typo3. Personally, I do not like YAML. But writing JSON or XML by hand is also not great fun.

You have to get your YAML right, or Typo3 might raise exceptions. Please check twice when in doubt. If you don't trust your editors for being able to write correct YAML, you can restrict the custom event path to a folder where they can not write.

Implementation

The calendar extension uses raw database queries to determine events. This is not generally considered as good practice, but it is way faster than to load complete events, just to find out when they start and end.