WebCalendar Developer Guide
Table of Contents
Introduction
WebCalendar is written in PHP. Although originally written
for PHP3, only PHP4 is officially supported. (It should also
work on PHP5, but testing has not been completed yet.)
Tools
The following tools will be helpful in WebCalendar development:
- perl:
Perl is used to check translation files to see what translations
are missing.
If you are using Windows, perl is included as part of the
cygwin package.
- make: The "make" command is used when generating WebCalendar
documentation in the docs directory.
The "make" command is standard on Linux if you install
certain development packages.
If you are using Windows, make is included as part of the
cygwin package.
- patch:
The "patch" command is used to apply patches posted
on the SourceForge patches area.
- diff: The "diff" command is used to create patches posted
on the SourceForge patches area.
- CVS:
Configuration management is managed using CVS.
- Access to Internet Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox,
and Apple Safari. We try to test on all three of these
platforms whenever we make any HTML or JavaScript changes.
If you do not have access to all these, please test your changes
on as many of these browsers as you have access to.
TIP If you are developing on a
Windows system, the Cygwin package
will provide command line tools that
include perl, make, patch, diff and cvs.
Getting The Code
You should always be using the latest code in CVS.
You can obtain the latest code using anonymous CVS.
(You do not
need to be an authorized WebCalendar developer).
Use the following commands to checkout the latest code from
CVS:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/webcalendar login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/webcalendar co webcalendar
This will create a webcalendar directory.
You should run these commands from one of the directories that
your web server is configured to use.
For example, on some Linux systems, the Apache document root is
configured to be /var/www/html. So,
you would change directories to that directories before
checking the code out of CVS.
You only need to perform this checkout once.
After the initial checkout, you can update your code with the following
command (run this command from inside the toplevel WebCalendar directory):
cvs update -d
If you have modified any of the WebCalendar files,
CVS will attempt to merge your changes with any changes to the
same file in the new code from CVS.
For example, if you modified the includes/functions.php file
on your system and a WebCalendar developer also modified this file
in CVS, then when you perform the CVS update, the changes will be
merged. If the merge fails, you will see a file with a .rej
extension and another with .orig.
Conventions
The following conventions have been adopted by WebCalendar (although
they have not been 100% enforced, so you will see exceptions):
- Function names: Use lowercase with an underscore '_' when naming
functions.
Example: dbi_query
- Database table names: All db tables are prefixed with "webcal_" and
are lowercase using underscores.
Example: webcal_user_pref
- PHP function comments: Function documentation is generated using
phpDocumentor.
Each function should be preceded by a DocBlock. See the phpDocumentor website for
information about DocBlocks and DocBlock syntax, and see
includes/functions.php
for examples.
- ChangeLog: if you have access to commit your changes to CVS, please
put an entry at the top of the ChangeLog file that describes the
change. If the change fixes a specific SourceForge bug, then
include the bug id in the description.
Coding Standards
The following coding standards have been adopted by WebCalendar (although
they have not been 100% implemented).
Creating a Patch File
TODO
Translations and Languages
When adding or modifying WebCalendar code, all displayed text should be translatable.
The following tips will ensure new text can be translated quickly and efficiently.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Why aren't you using PHP sessions?
- We are still considering using PHP4 sessions.
In fact, the install/index.php page does
use PHP sessions.
The cookie-based solution that WebCalendar uses is simple,
and it will work with all versions of PHP.
- Why aren't you using ADODB for database access?
- Again, this would be overkill for what we need. ADODB is a fairly
large project,
so I'm partial to my leaner php-dbi.php solution.
- Why aren't you using the PEAR database functions?
- WebCalendar pre-dates the PEAR database functions.
There does not seem to be sufficient reason to switch
from our existing code at this point.
- Why aren't you using a template engine like smarty?
- WebCalendar pre-dates most of the template engines out there.
We are currently evaluating some of the templating options
and may consider moving to one of the template systems in
the future.
- How do I install a patch?
- Different patches are applied differently.
Some patches just contain an updated file.
In that case, you should be able to use replace the old file
with the new (assuming the new file and your install are based
on the same version of WebCalendar).
Others are patch files, which usually have a .diff
or .patch file extension.
In order to use one of these files, you need the
GNU patch
program.
(This should be installed on all Linux systems and you can get a
version for Windows. I use the patch program that comes with
cygwin on windows.)
I would recommend testing the patch on your install first using the
--dry-run option.
For example, if the patch file is called calmods.diff,
then you would use:
patch --dry-run < calmods.diff
If the program says it cannot determine which file to patch,
try adding -p1:
patch --dry-run -p1 < calmods.diff
If it goes through all the changes successfully, do the same
command without the --dry-run option to install the patch.
If it says "hunk failed", then the patch cannot be applied without
hand-merging files. This essentially means that the patch was
based on a version of WebCalendar that is too different than
the version that you have installed, so it was unable to determine
how to apply some of the changes in the patch file.
Resources
The following resources may be helpful:
Last Update: $Id: WebCalendar-DeveloperGuide.html,v 1.6 2005/03/08 02:52:33 cknudsen Exp $
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