PHP and MySQL®: Create-Modify-Reuse

5.1. Designing the Application

The application you will write in this chapter is a personal calendar to help you keep your day-to-day activities and appointments organized. It will make use of two different, styled calendars—a month view for quick navigation and a day view to list the events.

The most prominent calendar will display the day's events in quarter-hour increments starting at 9 in the morning and running until 5 in the evening (the classic 9-to-5 work day). However, the starting and ending times will be coded as constants so they can easily by changed later to suit your needs. It will have links to navigate to the previous or next day's event calendar.

Although the day-view calendar only shows events between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm, some events may be scheduled beyond those hours. The events scheduled outside the viewed timeframe will be listed separately off to the side as a list.

The less prominent calendar will display the days in the currently viewed month and will be used to help navigate to previous or following months and jump to specific days.

A form will be used to allow the addition of new events to the calendar. It will accept a brief description or name of the event, the time it is scheduled for and if a reminder should be sent via e-mail an hour before the event is scheduled. There will also be a link to download the appointments as an ics file to make it easy to share the calendar with others.

You can see all these components laid out in Figure 5-1, which ...