Loïc Corbasson, a
Summer of Code student, introduces his project,
Theming in KOrganiser:
Today
KOrganizer's theming interface, CalendarDecoration, is not widely used. Plugins using the interface have to be written in C++, and the functionality remains simple.
My goals during Summer of Code would be:
- to allow for more features (background images, image/quote of the week/month, etc)
- to write some example plugins (national calendars, "This day in history" links, ...)
- to make it easier to write simple decorations for KOrganizer using a portable and easy-to-use format, which may be extended in the future (like the KDE themes).
Looking for a way to distinguish customisations on calendars, I found that paper-based calendars use two types of customizations:
- not combinable decorations, like color themes, backgrounds, etc.; these are making the overall look of the calendar;
- combinable decorations: quote of the day, day number in the year, moon phases, etc.; these are restricted to an area of the calendar, e.g. the top of the day columns in the weekly calendars.
KOrganizer currently looks like this:
An interface for the second item is already implemented: CalendarDecoration. During SoC, I will develop a few additional plugins for it, as well as an interface and plugins for the first item, the CalendarTheme part.
I think the best way to extend/create the needed interfaces is to make each feature specific to a particular view. Pictures of the day are would be too small in a month view, and showing the picture of the month in the week or day views doesn't seem very useful to me either. Different views allow for different customizations, the first criteria being of course available space, which is for example very narrow for a day, and larger for a month. This makes the whole more featureful and entertaining too: imagine if all your calendars, from the year planner to the daily agenda all looked the same! How sad and boring! :)
Decorations should also be able to be more than text, so I plan to implement at least support for images. This could use either widgets directly (current solution), a HTML widget for richer text (Qt or KHTML depending on the features we want to make available), or KParts. KParts would of course be the most generic, but would have to create few overhead. An HTML widget seems a good point to start to me. Cornelius also thought about using moon phases from KMoon (a KDE panel applet); maybe some general KPart mechanism could be used to achieve this, but it's not high-priority. With some decorations (here, Wikipedia's Picture of the day as well as the days since beginning and till end of the year), KOrganizer may look like this:
Notes- Some co-ordination with the calendar printing plugin may also be useful to allow the user to either print the calendar as it is on the screen, or to print the background image on apart from the calendar entries (e.g. at the top, like in many paper-based monthly calendars), using a specific background color for the whole sheet of paper, and using a different color theme. But this is not high-priority either.
- I think the most convenient way of storing themes would be an XML file, or something more or less à la CSS, packed together with the background images in a zipped archive. (This will be implemented after experimenting with hard-coded themes of course)
- Using a portable format would allow to make use of KNewStuff et cetera.
- Building on something already there being generally easier than starting from scratch, I will probably start by extending CalendarDecoration, which will allow me to better know the codebase.
As most of you probably already know, the Summer of Code has already started. I'd like to collect as much ideas as I can before implementing - feel free to suggest improvements or alternatives!
I hope I made clear what I planned to do, and why - if your pet feature isn't planned, complain! :)
