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Hi,

over the last few months I've seen quite a lot marathons happening in the community, apart from the "big ones" like the *GDQs. That's pretty awesome Smiley

The one thing I noticed though, was the varying quality of marathon schedules. There are the good ones (again, like GDQ) and the ... not so good ones. Things like Google Docs make it hard to view them on my phone and ambiguous timezone identifiers confuse me sometimes. I can of course understand that small marathons don't have the resources to pull something dedicated off. I think this is one place where I can finally contribute back to the community: Over the last few months, I've worked on Horaro, an open-source, PHP-based tool to manage events and schedules.

You can take a look at this early, somewhat unfinished version here: http://horaro.kabukiman.org/ -- to give you an understand of how schedules look (woo, tables!), take a peek at some schedules I took the liberty in copying by hand to test my code:
(Note that neither SDA nor ESA have anything to do with the project or endorse it in any way. Those are just my personal "archives" I pulled up from archive.org and various sites.)

Right now I'm looking for any kind of feedback. Would you use it? If not, why not? What's missing and what's confusing/buggy?

Please don't spam my hosted version; I didn't want to annoy people with using a captcha, so I trust in you to do the right thing ;-)

Thanks in advance for your constructive input :-)

Features
  • MIT licensed (aka "take it and do what you want with it, but leave my copyright note in it")
  • PHP 5.4 + MySQL and you're fine. Or use my hosted version.
  • Most things should work fine on tablets and phones. Editing schedules is a pain on phones, though ;-) Viewing them however is perfectly fine.
  • Users can register to create events and within each event a number of schedules. You get nice-looking, clean URLs for your events and schedules.
  • Schedules can have up to 10 columns.
  • Schedules can use one of around 15 themes.
  • If needed, events and schedules can be made private (and require a key in the URL to view).
  • Registration does not require any personal information.
  • Times for schedule items are automatically calculated based on their length (duh).
  • Easy timezone handling. Semantic HTML5 markup ensures dates and times are always un-ambiguous.
  • Each event/schedule has its own website/twitter/twitch account (linked in the top navbar).
  • Schedule times are automatically converted in viewer's timezone; current and next item is shown above the schedule.
  • Schedules are available as JSON/JSONP/XML/CSV/iCal. The iCal URL can be subscribed to from Google Calendar, iCalendar, Thunderbird or Outlook (though I only tested Google Calendar and iCalendar), so times in your calendar are automatically kept up-to-date.
  • No social media, webtrackers or other analytics software integrated.
Known Issues / TODO
  • Moving schedule rows and columns works best in Chrome, more or less okay in Firefox and IE and not at all on touch devices.
  • Changing the UI language in your profile only changes the date formatting.
  • To collaborate, you need to share the same account. Teams will be implemented later, if it turns out people actually need it.
  • Browser compatibility was not much of a concern. The editing side requires you to use a modern browser, the viewing side should work more or less okay in all current browsers.
Please note that I'm not planning to build a full-featured event website with forums, stream integration and the like. If you're looking for something like that, speedrun.com might be a choice.
Thread title:  
Edit history:
Tterraj42: 2014-10-19 06:58:31 am
Tterraj42: 2014-10-19 06:54:56 am
Games!
This looks amazing! Good work.

I can't think of anything you missed, got all the basics covered, and then some.

The team idea sounds worth doing. Having one account and sharing the details would work, but is more open to mistakes and misuse. Is there an undo if someone were to muck it up badly?

Edit: I worked really hard on those google docs though Sad

Edit Edit: It's minor but, on account creation, it says creating and joining teams is already a feature http://puu.sh/ciruc/57f0c1b121.png
Oh yeah you're right, I wrote that thing in the register form ages ago when I still planned on doing teams right away. Gotta change that Smiley

I didn't want to offend anyone for their work, whatever tool they used. :-) The same way I offer some nice, schedule-specific features, you as an author have to give up a lot of flexibility that Google Docs et al. would normally give you. It's a trade off at the end of the day ;-)
Games!
No denying this will make for a better schedule. I'm still very surprised there's no way to get the user's time zone using google docs, but alas.

I could see linking to a google doc as the 'website' for things like donation total and bid wars. So we'll probably do that. What about adding a site link specifically for donations?
I was thinking about allowing to give an event/schedule description as Markdown (or, more specifically, CommonMark). This would allow you to link the donation page from there, even though they would be somewhat "buried" in the text.

The top navbar can't hold an unlimited number of links as it is. I can see how having a dedicated (somewhat highlighted) link for donations can be useful, though. Maybe it would be a good idea to allow an arbitrary number of links and show them as a dropdown. This would scale much better and I don't have to add X predefined links (donations, incentives, prizes, more info, ....).

I'll note it down Smiley
Edit history:
Tterraj42: 2014-10-19 11:05:05 am
Tterraj42: 2014-10-19 07:29:47 am
Games!
Sounds like a fair solution.

Two more minor things:

Can I rename the two fixed columns? http://puu.sh/cisOh/4adacbb31e.png Scheduled -> Start Time / Estimated -> Estimate

The text on editing columns has one mistake, and is a little unclear http://puu.sh/cisXx/160eedcd0b.png Here's a suggested revision:

Each schedule has its own set of columns, which control what data you can edit in the schedule (duh). There are two fixed columns for each schedule: "Estimated" which is the duration of the entry (a time span like 01:20:00) and "Scheduled" which is the scheduled start time (automatically calculated). You cannot influence those (i.e. you cannot move them around or remove them). In addition, each schedule must have at least one, but no more than ten, user defined columns.
Just to clarify: Markdown support is not yet integrated. I'm not fully sure what I want to allow where, but the advantage of at least making things bold/italic in the schedule is definitely a good reason to have Markdown on the roadmap.

Renaming the two fixed columns is not yet possible, I opened a ticket for that.
I've incorporated your suggestions for the column-edit description, but have not yet deployed a new version to the server. Thanks Smiley
Hockey enthusiast
This is just great!

I'll make sure to keep myself updated with your project!
check your pantry
Bookmarked for future use. This looks fantastic, keep up the good work!
The cake is a lie
Hello,

I tried to use your schedule creator before a potential future use, but when I click on the box to enter a date, nothing shows, and I can't find the way to enter the date in the right format.

Gyoo.
Edit history:
peter afro: 2014-11-06 04:29:45 pm
How do you make the schedule for an event?
never mind, figured it out. Could be more clear though.
I blinked and missed this thread.

Going to be using this in the future, great work!