First the disclaimer:
Bob's Web Calendar Software
Copyright (C) 2008 Robert Styma
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Bob's Web Calendar Software is designed to generate static web pages which can be uploaded to a web site. After this point I will refer to Bob's Web Calendar Software simply as "the program".
The web pages are static in that they are not connected to a database or any backend program. The web pages get generated and published in whenever you tell the program to do so. It is useful for generating calendars containing club practice schedules and events.
In it's simplest form, you open the program, and see displayed a calendar for the current month. You can go backwards and forwards through the months. If you double click a day on the calendar. A dialog will open which will allow you to put text on that day. When you press OK, the text gets associated with that day. It does not show up on the screen, it will only appear when you publish a web page. You can tell which days have something associated with them because they have a beige background instead of white. If you hover the mouse over these squares, the text will be displayed. Periodically you will want to save your work just as you would with any editor.
The calendar data you enter is saved locally on your machine. By default, the calendar file is saved in the "My Documents" folder on your desktop. You can choose another folder. This file, with the suffix ".wcal" does not contain web pages, but contains the internal format used by the program. It is just a text file and you could look at it with Notepad, but it is recommended that you do not edit it directly. If you mess up the format, it may no longer be readable by the program. You can have multiple independent calendars.
Calendar web pages are generated with the publish pulldown. You will need to look at the Publish->Publish Preferences before you do a publish. The preferences determine which folder is used for web page generation. This folder is where the web pages are generated if you just generate locally and also it is the staging area for publishing to a web site.
In addition to associating data with a particular day, you can enter data which will be placed above or below any months calendar. You can also enter data which will be placed above or below all the months calendars.
You do not have to know any HTML syntax to use this program, although it can help. What you type in for each day is what is placed into the calendar. If you know HTML, the calendar is a table and what you type is placed between the <TD> and the </TD>. The day of the month is put in front of your data separated by a <BR> (Line break). The data above and below the calendar is placed between <P> and </P>. If you want to code additional HTML, you can.
If you want to learn the basics of HTML, the best free place I have found is: W3Schools . You can learn the basics and many advanced techniques. It is an excellent resource.
