Legacy Software - iCal


Tips and Tricks

This page contains a few helpful tips and tricks for customizing your calendar.

IDT Include Files
IDT include file are commonly used for Holidays, Moon Phases, Birthdays, Paydays etc. You can create these files yourself. They are simply text files that end with a .IDT extension. You place these files into the the directory that contains your calendar files. You should find a couple of .IDT files distributed with your calendar software. You optionally choose to include these IDT data files onto your calendars from the Administration Add-Ins calendar page. IDT Details will describe how to create your own files. Below are some idt files you can download and use.
iFrames to embed calendars in web pages
iFrames permit your web pages to pull the contents of other web pages into table cells and other html structures. This allows dynamic calendars to be part of your web page content. The HTML code could look something like this:
<iframe src="http://your.domain.org/MyCalendar" width="100%" height="300"></iframe>

Adding Graphical Images
Adding graphical images to your calendar is easy to accomplish. It is requires embedding a small amount of html into the text that is to appear on the calendar. The images to appear can be located anywhere, but it is easiest if you put these images into the iCal installation folder.
Example for an image in your calendar directory
This code will work because the image ical2.jpg is installed with iCal program. Use this as the text for a calendar event.

<IMG SRC="/ical2.jpg"> Cool!

Example for an image located somewhere on the network

<IMG SRC="http://www.brownbearsw.com/images/penguin.gif"> Cool! `


Side Bar Menu
There is a clever trick that can be used to get a menu along the left side of your calendar. This is accomplished by putting html code in the calendar header and footer. Below are samples for the header and footer. You can customize these to your own needs.

This goes in the calendar header
</table>
<table width="100%" background="/images/background.jpg">
<tr><td>Side Bar Content goes here...</td>
<td><table>

This goes in the calendar footer
</table>
Yes, the table tags don't match up; the calendar generates some that fit together with these. You may need to experiment a bit to get it looking right :-)