[Kolab-devel] integrate fbview into horde

[Richard Bos]

Hi,

the kolab project has since a very long time offered the fbview portal to 
quickly find out which people or free or busy.  Now that kolab is nicely 
integrated into horde (or the other way), it is possible to obtain the freebusy 
information directly from horde.  But..., this is a bit complicated: there are
 many mouse clicks involved to obtain the view.  On the other hand with a 
patched kronolith menu, the best of both worlds could be obtained.

I discussed this a bit offline with Gunnar, but we want to get the opinion about
this from the kolab-devel ML.  I'll copy and paste Gunnar's lat email to me 
about this below, so you can have a look at it, and please let us now your 
thoughts about this:

=========  Gunnar - Richard discussion =========
> I was able to add an fbview entry to the horde/kronolith menu, see attached 
> diff.  The result can be seen in attachment fbview1.  When selecting the 
> link, it opens the attendees web form, but there is not top menu (see 
> fbview2).  Do you know how to create such a top menu?
> Perhaps with a bit of code from:
> http://kolab.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs-kolab.cgi/server/patches/fbview/HK-GW-kronolith_2.2_RC1-Fbview_menu.patch?rev=1.1&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
>
> You wrote that the patch that I referred to above won't make it upstream, but 
> won't it be possible to do it like this:
>
> If ($conf['kolab']['enable'] = yes) {  (***)
>  require KRONOLITH_TEMPLATES . '/fbview-menu.inc';
> } else {
>  require KRONOLITH_TEMPLATES . '/menu.inc';
> }
>
> That way the link will only be visible for kolab installation.
> ***) Or make the the variable more general:
> $conf['something']['with']['enable']['freebusy link']

I'd definitely suggest you send this to kolab-devel first. It makes
more sense to discuss this in that forum.

With the current fbview (1) you have the following situation:

 - You log in
 - You see the desired view

Using kronolith (2) you get the same with three intermediate clicks:

 - You log in
 - You select kronolith
 - You create a new event
 - You select the attendee view
 - You see the desired view

With your solution (3) you have:

 - You log in
 - You select kronolith
 - You select the attendee view
 - You see the desired view

It might be possible to add fbview as a reduced kronolith as a
separate application (4) in the side panel of the horde installation:

 - You log in
 - You select fbview
 - You see the desired view

Each solution has its drawbacks:

(1) 

  - Duplicate installation of the Horde basis (a lot of code)
  - Two entirely separate installations

(2)

  - Way too complicated click trail

(3)

  - Long click trail

>> remark from Richard: people might already be logged in (e.g. to read email
>> browse their agenda): if this is the case, it is even easier to obtain the
>> FB information.  As there is no need to fill the FB url, and there is no need
>> to login, it is even faster that the current fbview implementation....



(4)

  - Duplicated kronolith code (rather small)


I think I like your suggestion best but this should be discussed by
more people. I could then discuss it with Jan and Chuck. They usually
have some useful comments when it comes to the hrode structure. Maybe
they'd be willing to make the free/busy view more accessible within
Kronolith.

Cheers,

Gunnar


> --- tree_menu.php.bak 2007-12-12 09:04:44.000000000 +0100
> +++ tree_menu.php     2007-12-12 10:45:50.000000000 +0100
> @@ -23,6 +23,7 @@
>              array('week', _("Week"), 'weekview.png', Horde::applicationUrl('week.php')),
>              array('month', _("Month"), 'monthview.png', Horde::applicationUrl('month.php')),
>              array('year', _("Year"), 'yearview.png', Horde::applicationUrl('year.php')),
> +            array('fbview', _("Fbview"), 'attendees.png', Horde::applicationUrl('attendees.php')),
>              array('search', _("Search"), 'search.png', Horde::applicationUrl('search.php'), $registry->getImageDir('horde')),
>          );


-- 
Richard Bos
Without a home the journey is endless