1 Introduction
2 ------------
3
4 The EventAggregator macro for MoinMoin can be used to display event calendars
5 or listings which obtain their data from pages belonging to specific
6 categories (such as CategoryEvents) or from remote event sources. The start
7 and end dates are read from the page describing each event, and the calendar
8 is automatically filled out with the details of each event, colouring each
9 event period in a specially generated colour. Maps showing event locations are
10 also supported, given the availability of appropriate map images and location
11 information.
12
13 The EventAggregatorSummary action can be used to provide iCalendar and RSS
14 summaries of event data based on pages belonging to specific categories, as
15 described above. The category, start and end parameters are read directly from
16 the request as URL or form parameters: these restrict the extent of each
17 generated summary.
18
19 The EventAggregatorNewEvent action can be used to conveniently create new
20 event pages, displaying a simple form which can be filled out in order to
21 provide elementary event details such as the event title or summary, the
22 categories to which the page will be assigned, and the start and end dates of
23 the event.
24
25 The eventfeed script can be used to import events from RSS feeds, inserting
26 new pages into a Wiki.
27
28 Important Notices
29 -----------------
30
31 In release 0.9, much of the common support code has been moved to the
32 MoinSupport distribution, thus introducing that distribution as a dependency
33 which must be installed for EventAggregator to work. See the documentation
34 regarding dependencies for further details.
35
36 Release 0.8.4 fixes time zone offset calculations for time regimes west of the
37 prime meridian.
38
39 Release 0.8.3 fixes end dates in events aggregated from remote iCalendar
40 sources.
41
42 Release 0.7.1 restores MoinMoin 1.9.x compatibility which was accidentally
43 lost in the 0.7 release.
44
45 Release 0.6.2 fixes various bugs in HTML production done by the actions. It is
46 strongly recommended to upgrade from earlier versions to this or a later
47 release.
48
49 In release 0.6.2, support for MoinMoin 1.5.x has been dropped. Since usage of
50 the Xapian search software is practically a necessary part of deploying this
51 solution, and yet Xapian only became integrated with MoinMoin from version 1.6
52 onwards, few deployments should have involved MoinMoin 1.5.x.
53
54 In release 0.6, support for event times has been introduced. Due to the
55 complicated nature of times, time zones, time regimes, and so on, the
56 behaviour of the software may change in future versions to support common
57 use-cases in a more convenient fashion. Please be aware that implicitly chosen
58 or generated time or time zone information may change for events, particularly
59 those whose times are ambiguous or ill-defined. It is highly recommended that
60 the pytz library be installed - see the documentation regarding dependencies
61 for more information.
62
63 In release 0.5, the "download this calendar" and "subscribe to this calendar"
64 links have been fixed to return only events within the specified period and to
65 work with day- and month-relative calendars. Users who have bookmarks in their
66 Web browser or feed reader should replace these bookmarks by visiting the
67 bookmarked page and acquiring new versions of these links, once
68 EventAggregator has been upgraded.
69
70 Installation
71 ------------
72
73 To install the support library and MoinMoin-related scripts, consider using
74 the moinsetup tool. See the "Recommended Software" section below for more
75 information.
76
77 With moinsetup and a suitable configuration file, the installation is done as
78 follows with $EADIR referring to the EventAggregator distribution directory
79 containing this README.txt file:
80
81 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m install_extension_package $EADIR
82 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m install_actions $EADIR/actions
83 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m install_macros $EADIR/macros
84 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m install_parsers $EADIR/parsers
85 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m install_theme_resources $EADIR
86 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m edit_theme_stylesheet screen.css event-aggregator.css
87 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m edit_theme_stylesheet print.css event-aggregator.css
88 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m edit_theme_stylesheet print.css event-aggregator-print.css
89
90 The first command above uses the setup.py script provided as follows:
91
92 python setup.py install --prefix=path-to-moin-prefix
93
94 The second, third and fourth commands install the actions, macros and parsers
95 respectively.
96
97 The fifth command installs the theme resources in the available theme
98 directories.
99
100 The remaining commands activate the styles provided by EventAggregator by
101 editing the screen.css and print.css files which are typically provided by
102 themes. These commands add imports of the following form to the theme
103 stylesheets:
104
105 @import "event-aggregator.css";
106
107 Additional Installation Tasks
108 -----------------------------
109
110 See the "Dependencies" section below for details of the software featured in
111 this section.
112
113 EventAggregator depends on MoinSupport having been installed. This is because
114 a lot of useful functionality common to a number of MoinMoin extensions now
115 resides in the MoinSupport distribution.
116
117 The following command can be run with $MSDIR referring to the MoinSupport
118 distribution directory:
119
120 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m install_extension_package $MSDIR
121
122 To support iCalendar summary production for calendars as well as the
123 capability of aggregating iCalendar format event sources, the vContent
124 software needs to be obtained and installed.
125
126 The following command can be run with $VCDIR referring to the vContent
127 distribution directory:
128
129 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m install_extension_package $VCDIR
130
131 In each case, the install_extension_package method merely runs the setup.py
132 script provided by the software concerned, installing the software under the
133 configured installation "prefix".
134
135 Useful Pages
136 ------------
137
138 The pages directory contains a selection of useful pages using a syntax
139 appropriate for use with MoinMoin 1.6 or later. These pages can be created
140 through the Wiki and their contents copied in from each of the files. An
141 easier installation method is to issue the following commands:
142
143 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m make_page_package $EADIR/pages pages.zip
144 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m install_page_package pages.zip
145
146 You may need to switch user in order to have sufficient privileges to copy the
147 page package into the Wiki. For example:
148
149 sudo -u www-data python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m install_page_package pages.zip
150
151 Resource Pages
152 --------------
153
154 For the map view, some resource pages are provided with EventAggregator.
155 Unlike the help pages which are most likely to be left unedited, the resource
156 pages should be modified and updated with additional map and place details.
157 Consequently, upgrading these pages is not necessarily desirable when new
158 releases of EventAggregator are made available, and thus these pages are kept
159 separate from the help pages.
160
161 To install the resource pages, use the following commands:
162
163 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m make_page_package $EADIR/resource_pages resource_pages.zip
164 python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m install_page_package resource_pages.zip
165
166 You may need to switch user in order to have sufficient privileges to copy the
167 page package into the Wiki. For example:
168
169 sudo -u www-data python moinsetup.py -f moinsetup.cfg -m install_page_package resource_pages.zip
170
171 Using the Macro
172 ---------------
173
174 It should now be possible to edit pages and use the macro as follows:
175
176 <<EventAggregator(CategoryEvents)>>
177
178 As arguments to the macro, you must indicate a comma-separated list of
179 categories to be inspected for event data. For example:
180
181 <<EventAggregator(CategoryEvents,CategoryTraining)>>
182
183 By default, this should display a calendar in a collection of tables, one for
184 each month containing events. To show a collection of month-by-month listings,
185 use the 'mode' argument as follows:
186
187 <<EventAggregator(CategoryEvents,mode=list)>>
188
189 To use remote event sources instead of categories in the Wiki, specify each
190 source using explicit source parameters:
191
192 <<EventAggregator(source=GriCal,source=FSFE)>>
193
194 This will aggregate events from the GriCal and FSFE calendars residing on
195 remote Web sites, provided that these sources have been defined in the event
196 sources dictionary.
197
198 To use a search pattern, use the search parameter and specify the search
199 criteria just as you would when using the standard search macros:
200
201 <<EventAggregator(search="title:MonthCalendarEvents/")>>
202
203 This will aggregate events found on subpages of the MonthCalendarEvents page.
204
205 See pages/HelpOnEventAggregator for more detailed information.
206
207 Using the Actions
208 -----------------
209
210 To obtain an iCalendar summary, the EventAggregatorSummary action can be
211 selected from the actions menu on any page. Alternatively, a collection of
212 parameters can be specified in the URL of any Wiki page.
213
214 See pages/HelpOnEventAggregatorSummary for more detailed information.
215
216 To create new events using the EventAggregatorNewEvent action, the appropriate
217 menu entry can be selected in the actions menu. Alternatively, clicking on a
218 day number in a calendar view will invoke the action and pre-fill the form
219 with the start date set to the selected day from the calendar.
220
221 See pages/HelpOnEventAggregatorNewEvent for more detailed information.
222
223 Running the Scripts
224 -------------------
225
226 Note that remote event sources are likely to be more useful than the scripts
227 described below. However, these scripts may be useful for certain kinds of
228 application.
229
230 To import events from an RSS feed, the eventfeed script integrated with the
231 moin program can be used as follows:
232
233 moin --config-dir=path-to-wiki --wiki-url=example.com/ \
234 import eventfeed --url=url-of-events-feed
235
236 Thus, to import events from the FSFE events RSS feed, the following command
237 could be used:
238
239 moin --config-dir=path-to-wiki --wiki-url=example.com/ \
240 import eventfeed --url=http://www.fsfe.org/events/events.en.rss
241
242 If this command is being used with sudo, make sure to use the -u option so
243 that the script can operate as the appropriate user. For example:
244
245 sudo -u www-data moin --config-dir=path-to-wiki --wiki-url=example.com/ \
246 import eventfeed --url=http://www.fsfe.org/events/events.en.rss
247
248 It may also be necessary to set PYTHONPATH directly before the moin program
249 name and even to explicitly use the path to that program.
250
251 Recommended Software
252 --------------------
253
254 See the "Dependencies" section below for essential software.
255
256 The moinsetup tool is recommended for installation since it aims to support
257 all versions of MoinMoin that are supported for use with this software.
258
259 See the following page for information on moinsetup:
260
261 http://moinmo.in/ScriptMarket/moinsetup
262
263 The Xapian search software is highly recommended, if not technically
264 essential, for the acceptable performance of the EventAggregator macro since
265 the macro makes use of search routines in MoinMoin that can dominate the time
266 spent processing requests.
267
268 See the following page for information on Xapian and MoinMoin:
269
270 http://moinmo.in/HelpOnXapian
271
272 Troubleshooting: Categories
273 ---------------------------
274
275 See here for a bug related to category recognition:
276
277 http://moinmo.in/MoinMoinBugs/1.7TemplatesNotAppearing
278
279 This affects installations where migrations between versions have occurred,
280 yet the Wiki configuration retains old regular expression details.
281
282 Troubleshooting: Xapian
283 -----------------------
284
285 Xapian can be troublesome, especially where file permissions are concerned: if
286 something acquires a lock on the index (for example, the moin script, possibly
287 invoked via moinsetup) nothing else will be able to modify the index, and this
288 may cause pages to become detached from their categories in the index.
289
290 To resolve index issues, try and run the following command (with the appropriate
291 options):
292
293 moin --config-dir=path-to-wiki --wiki-url=example.com/ index build --mode=rebuild
294
295 It may be necessary to manually remove locks. This can be done as follows:
296
297 find path-to-wiki/data/cache/xapian -depth -name "*lock" -type d -exec rmdir '{}' \;
298
299 Troubleshooting: Plain Text Formatting
300 --------------------------------------
301
302 Plain text formatting is used in certain places in EventAggregator, but the
303 formatter is rather broken in MoinMoin 1.8 and in previous releases. See the
304 following page for a summary:
305
306 http://moinmo.in/FeatureRequests/TextPlainFormatterRewrite
307
308 A patch is supplied in the patches directory to fix link formatting in the
309 plain text formatter, and once copied into the root directory of the MoinMoin
310 1.8 sources it can be applied as follows:
311
312 patch -p1 < patch-plain-text-link-formatting-1.8.diff
313
314 Contact, Copyright and Licence Information
315 ------------------------------------------
316
317 See the following Web pages for more information about this work:
318
319 http://moinmo.in/MacroMarket/EventAggregator
320 http://moinmo.in/ActionMarket/EventAggregator
321
322 The author can be contacted at the following e-mail address:
323
324 paul@boddie.org.uk
325
326 Copyright and licence information can be found in the docs directory - see
327 docs/COPYING.txt and docs/LICENCE.txt for more information.
328
329 Dependencies
330 ------------
331
332 EventAggregator has the following basic dependencies:
333
334 Packages Release Information
335 -------- -------------------
336
337 MoinSupport Tested with 0.2
338 Source: http://hgweb.boddie.org.uk/MoinSupport
339
340 vContent Tested with 0.2
341 Source: http://hgweb.boddie.org.uk/vContent
342
343 pytz Tested with 2007k (specifically 2007k-0ubuntu2)
344 Source: http://pytz.sourceforge.net/
345
346 If time zone handling is not required, pytz need not be installed, but this
347 may result in iCalendar summaries being produced that provide insufficient
348 time zone information for the correct interpretation of time information in
349 those summaries. Thus, it is highly recommended that pytz be installed.
350
351 New in EventAggregator 0.9.1 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.9)
352 ----------------------------------------------------------------
353
354 * Changed iCalendar serialisation to use the vContent library, making
355 vContent a requirement of this software.
356
357 New in EventAggregator 0.9 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.8.5)
358 ----------------------------------------------------------------
359
360 * Moved much of the support library to the MoinSupport distribution, thus
361 introducing a dependency on that software.
362 * Added support for in-page updates of the event views so that navigation
363 between days, months and different views does not cause a full-page
364 reload if JavaScript is enabled.
365 * Tidied up the new event form, showing a list of known locations for
366 selection, making the event location affect the chosen time zone/regime if
367 the location is known, and hiding latitude and longitude fields unless an
368 unknown location is to be specified.
369 * The EventLocationsDict or equivalent can now retain time zone/regime
370 information about each location.
371 * Added an event parser that can format special page regions in different
372 ways and support links directly to such regions.
373 * Permitted Wiki markup in the description and location metadata.
374 * Added support for search patterns so that event pages can be obtained
375 through arbitrary searches and do not have to belong to particular
376 categories.
377 * Encoded map location pop-up headings as plain text in order to handle
378 locations specified using Wiki formatting.
379 * Permitted events with map references but without location details to be
380 positioned in maps.
381 * Improved navigation between months and days, and between view modes for
382 both levels of calendar view.
383
384 New in EventAggregator 0.8.5 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.8.4)
385 ------------------------------------------------------------------
386
387 * Fixed iCalendar quoting for newlines in calendar data.
388
389 New in EventAggregator 0.8.4 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.8.3)
390 ------------------------------------------------------------------
391
392 * The calculation of hour and minute offsets for time regimes west of the
393 prime meridian was not producing correct results since the day offset
394 provided by pytz was not being considered in the calculation. Such regimes
395 should now produce the expected (hour, minute) offsets such that events
396 employing these regimes can be positioned correctly on a UTC timescale.
397
398 New in EventAggregator 0.8.3 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.8.2)
399 ------------------------------------------------------------------
400
401 * The end dates defined in events from remote iCalendar event sources were
402 not correctly adjusted when aggregating such events. Thus, events with a
403 day-level resolution will have appeared one day longer in calendars and
404 summaries than was actually specified in the source data. This adjustment
405 has now been introduced.
406
407 New in EventAggregator 0.8.2 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.8.1)
408 ------------------------------------------------------------------
409
410 * Improved the error handling around remote event source data retrieval,
411 introducing handling of missing resources and unsupported content types.
412 * Improved the presentation of download and subscription links, adding
413 webcal: URL links for suitable calendar clients.
414
415 New in EventAggregator 0.8.1 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.8)
416 ----------------------------------------------------------------
417
418 * Changed the EventAggregatorNewEvent action to not save new event pages
419 directly, instead invoking the textual page editor for the page so that
420 the page text can be changed and the page saved without a redundant
421 initial version being created. Cancelling the editing operation will also
422 avoid the creation of unwanted event pages.
423 * Added a page break before each map in the print view, adding a page break
424 after each map to fully isolate unpositioned events on separate pages.
425 * Fixed errors where empty location fields were given in vCalendar events.
426 * Reintroduced event sorting in the list and table views.
427 * Fixed location positioning where some events employing an unknown location
428 do not position that location whereas others do (using "geo" information).
429
430 New in EventAggregator 0.8 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.7.1)
431 ----------------------------------------------------------------
432
433 * Added remote event aggregation with support for iCalendar event sources.
434 * Added support for explicit latitude and longitude event properties.
435 * Added support for decimal latitude and longitude values.
436 * Introduced in-page updates of the new event form, avoiding full-page
437 reloads when editing the initial details of an event.
438
439 New in EventAggregator 0.7.1 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.7)
440 ----------------------------------------------------------------
441
442 * Restored MoinMoin 1.9.x compatibility around WikiDict access.
443
444 New in EventAggregator 0.7 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.6.4)
445 ----------------------------------------------------------------
446
447 * Added a day view which shows events ordered according to their timespans
448 within each day.
449 * Added a map view which shows events according to their location. This
450 requires map images to be uploaded to a designated page, and map locations
451 to be defined on a designated page.
452 * Switched to using moinsetup for the installation procedure.
453 * Introduced formatting of description, location and topic information in
454 the list and table views and in RSS format summaries.
455 * Introduced support for days as calendar period units in the list view.
456 * Added "Help" and "New event" links alongside the calendar view controls,
457 giving the download and view controls centre alignment.
458
459 New in EventAggregator 0.6.4 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.6.3)
460 ------------------------------------------------------------------
461
462 * Fixed pop-up element labels where one limit of a calendar has not been
463 specified.
464
465 New in EventAggregator 0.6.3 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.6.2)
466 ------------------------------------------------------------------
467
468 * Fixed category membership parsing.
469 * Fixed open-ended calendars and their pop-up summaries.
470
471 New in EventAggregator 0.6.2 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.6.1)
472 ------------------------------------------------------------------
473
474 * Fixed HTML encoding in the forms generated by the actions.
475 * Dropped MoinMoin 1.5.x support, since Xapian search is not available for
476 that version and is virtually a necessity.
477 * Fixed form handling to be compatible with MoinMoin 1.9.x, since that
478 particular release series introduced an incompatible request API that
479 breaks existing code (no longer providing access to query string
480 parameters via the form attribute, and only returning single values
481 unless the new getlist method on form-like objects is used).
482 * Fixed the direct writing of requests to be compatible with MoinMoin 1.9.
483 * Added pop-up elements showing information about the calendar/view
484 resources available for download or subscription.
485 * Added download/subscription links which open the form associated with the
486 EventAggregatorSummary action and permit editing of the supplied values.
487
488 New in EventAggregator 0.6.1 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.6)
489 ----------------------------------------------------------------
490
491 * Fixed HTML encoding in the forms generated by the actions.
492
493 New in EventAggregator 0.6 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.5)
494 --------------------------------------------------------------
495
496 * Added print stylesheet rules in order to improve the printed versions of
497 calendars.
498 * Fixed definition list parsing to handle completely empty definitions
499 (having no space after the "::" token) which previously captured text from
500 subsequent lines, and merely empty definitions which previously would have
501 produced a single empty value for definitions providing lists of values.
502 * Added a script to import events from RSS feeds.
503 * Added support for a link entry in event pages, although this does not
504 replace the link information provided by the RSS and iCalendar summaries.
505 * Fixed the production of the summaries when pages with no available edit
506 log information are to be included.
507 * Added support for event times and time zone/regime information. This is
508 subject to revision.
509
510 New in EventAggregator 0.5 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.4)
511 --------------------------------------------------------------
512
513 * Changed the EventAggregatorNewEvent action to substitute only the stated
514 title, not the full page title, into the new page.
515 * Changed event colouring to use the event summary as the basis for
516 calculating the colour used in the calendar. This means that related
517 events can be coloured identically if their summaries are the same.
518 * Added support for multiple events on a single event page.
519 * Introduced EventPage and Event abstractions in order to better support new
520 features.
521 * Introduced basic and advanced modes to the EventAggregatorNewEvent action,
522 along with date swapping to correct cases where the start is given as
523 being later than the end of an event.
524 * Fixed the "download this calendar" and "subscribe to this calendar" links
525 by propagating the "raw" calendar start and end values within the macro.
526 These links should yield events only within the period defined for a
527 calendar, not all events in a calendar's categories. This fix also ensures
528 that the links for year- and month-relative calendars are correct, rather
529 than the specific links generated previously. Thus, a "this year's events"
530 link will now continue to produce a resource with the current year's
531 events, rather than the events from the year when the link was generated.
532
533 New in EventAggregator 0.4 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.3)
534 --------------------------------------------------------------
535
536 * Added a table view in the macro, using special topic/category styles to
537 provide background colours for events.
538 * Added category propagation from calendars to the new event form provided
539 by the EventAggregatorNewEvent action.
540 * Added a default template parameter to the macro, employed by the new event
541 form.
542 * Added a parent page parameter which is used by the new event form to place
543 new event pages in a particular location specific to a calendar or
544 collection of events.
545 * Improved the presentation of pop-up event information elements.
546 * Added navigation between display modes (calendar, list and table views).
547 * Ensured that calendar settings are retained when creating new events for a
548 calendar.
549 * Fixed various problems with events not having topics.
550
551 New in EventAggregator 0.3 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.2)
552 --------------------------------------------------------------
553
554 * Added a parameter to the EventAggregatorSummary action to select the
555 source of event descriptions for the RSS feed.
556 * Updated the documentation to cover the RSS support.
557 * Added the EventAggregatorNewEvent action.
558
559 New in EventAggregator 0.2 (Changes since EventAggregator 0.1)
560 --------------------------------------------------------------
561
562 * Improved the calendar view in the macro to use the fixed table layout
563 algorithm and to provide cells spanning potentially many columns for
564 continuing events. Introduced pop-up elements in order to show truncated
565 event names.
566 * Made the "weekly" naming policy the default in the calendar view.
567 * Improved the list view in the macro.
568 * Introduced RSS 2.0 feed support.
569 * Improved the help pages.
570
571 Release Procedures
572 ------------------
573
574 Update the EventAggregatorSupport.py __version__ attribute and the setup.py
575 version details.
576 Change the version number and package filename/directory in the documentation.
577 Update the setup.py and PKG-INFO files.
578 Update the release notes (see above).
579 Tag, export.
580 Archive, upload.
581 Update the MacroMarket and ActionMarket (see above for the URLs).