WebCalendar Styling HOWTO

NOTE: THIS DOCUMENTATION IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Classes
  3. Styling Order of Precedence
  4. Styling for Individual Pages

Introduction

WebCalendar offers an easy-to-use method for customizing colors via the Admin Panel. This document provides a more technical, in depth analysis of WebCalendar's styling system. Please note: The WebCalendar styling system is still under construction. We plan on continuing to enhance functionality, and available options in the future.

WebCalendar uses CSS to format its content. For an introduction to CSS, you may wish to read Starting with HTML + CSS, and/or Dave Raggett's Introduction to CSS. The technical specifications are available at the W3C:

Trinity

WebCalendar's style system is built to be flexible, standardized, and clear. Understanding how each of these components work in conjunction with one another, as well as individually is key to gaining the full benefit of the ability to customize the look & feel of your WebCalendar without having to modify any PHP, or HTML. The remainder of this document will provide you with the information necessary to fully understand each of these components, and how they work together.

Structure

WebCalendar can be easily customized site-wide, or page-by-page. In other words, you can easily make every page in WebCalendar look similar to one another, or completely different from one another. WebCalendar achieves this effect by uniquely identifying each page.Each page in WebCalendar (obviously) has a filename. WebCalendar automatically takes each filename, removes any underscores (_), as well as the extension (.php), and assigns the resulting value as an ID attribute on that page's body tag. For example, the page "edit_entry.php" would have the following body tag: <body id="editentry">. If you don't want to customize individual pages, you can disregard this information.

If you want to customize the look of a single page in WebCalendar, prefix all selectors for that page with its <body>'s id. For example, to create styles that only apply to month.php, simply prefix all the selectors with #month. The id for each page is shown below.

Page Body ID
activity_log.php activitylog
add_entry.php addentry
admin.php admin
adminhome.php adminhome
approve_entry.php approveentry
assistant_edit.php assistantedit
category.php category
day.php day
del_entry.php delentry
del_layer.php dellayer
edit_entry.php editentry
edit_layer.php editlayer
edit_report.php editreport
edit_template.php edittemplate
edit_user.php edituser
export.php export
group_edit.php groupedit
groups.php groups
help_admin.php helpadmin
help_bug.php helpbug
help_edit_entry.php helpeditentry
help_import.php helpimport
help_index.php helpindex
help_layers.php helplayers
help_pref.php helppref
import.php import
index.php index
layers.php layers
layers_toggle.php layerstoggle
list_unapproved.php listunapproved
login.php login
month.php month
nonusers.php nonusers
pref.php pref
publish.php publish
purge.php purge
reject_entry.php rejectentry
report.php report
search.php search
select_user.php selectuser
set_entry_cat.php setentrycat
upcoming.php upcoming
users.php users
usersel.php usersel
view_d.php viewd
view_entry.php viewentry
view_l.php viewl
view_m.php viewm
view_t.php viewt
view_v.php viewv
view_w.php vieww
views.php views
views_edit.php viewsedit
week.php week
week_details.php weekdetails
year.php year

WebCalendar has two basic types of calendars: full-sized calendars, and mini-calendars. Each of these types use a specific structure. Full-sized calendars are organized using the structure outlined below. The header of the page is a div with the "title" class (i.e. <div class="title">). Within that div, there are several spans each with its own class. These classes include:

Also within this div are the left & right navigation arrows. The left arrow link has the "prev" class, and the right arrow link has the "next" class. Pages that have mini-calendars in place of the arrows use "prevmonth" and "nextmonth" with the ID attribute.

Structurally, the header of pages with a full-sized calendar will look similar to:

<div class="title">
	<span class="weeknumber"></span>
	<span class="view"></span>
	<span class="date"></span>
</div>

Example 1

Below the "title" div is a table with the "main" class. This is the full-size calendar itself. There are a variety of options available in styling the calendar. First, there are two types of cells in a table: tableheaders (<th> tags), and tablecells (<td> tags). WebCalendar distinguishes between column tableheaders & row tableheaders. Headers containing dates, or days of the week utilize the classes today, and weekend. To style tableheaders for Monday through Friday, while today is eDays of the week that are not Saturday or Sunday, and that are also not today's date, can be styled by simply referring to the "th" tag itself. Alternatively, if you don't want to style tableheaders according to the weekend, or today colors, you can simply omit this style from the stylesheet. Row tableheaders (when they don't contain dates) are always styled using the class, "row".

Tablecells (td tags) within the "main" calendar table follow the same structure as tableheaders with dates, or days. Therefore, tablecells that fall on the weekend, will have the "weekend" class. If the cell is on today's date, but it's not on Saturday or Sunday, the cell will have the "today" class. If the cell is not on the weekend, nor today's date, it doesn't get a class (in this case, style these cells similar to how you styled tableheaders without a class). If the cell is both on the weekend, and on today's date, it has "weekend today" as the value for the class attribute. Below are some examples to help illustrate.

If you're customizing month.php & want tablecells (td tags) on today's date to have a red background, you would use:

#month td.today {
	background-color: red;
}

Example 1

Similarly, if customizing month.php & you want tablecells occuring on the weekend to have a thin black border with 10 pixels of padding on each side, you would use:

#month td.weekend {
	border: 1px solid black;
	padding: 10px;
}

Example 2

Clearly there will be times when tablecells will be both on the weekend, as well as on today's date. In such an instance, styles from each of the classes are combined. For example, if today is a Saturday, the HTML for that cell would be <td class="weekend today">. Using the classes from examples one & two above, this cell would have a red background, with a thin black border, and 10 pixels of padding on each side.

Now say the styles had looked like this:

.today {
	background-color: red;
}

.weekend {
	border: 1px solid black;
	padding: 10px;
	background-color: blue;
}

.hasevents {
	font-weight: bold;
}

Example 2

Note that both the today class and the weekend class have a background-color definition. So does our example <td> (which belongs to both the today and weekend classes) end up with a red background or a blue one? This conflict is decided by the Styling Order of Precedence.

Styling Order of Precedence

When conflicts arise between styles (as in Example 2 above), the definition from the class with the highest precedence is chosen. The order of precedence is:

  1. today
  2. hasevents
  3. weekend
  4. empty

This says that styles defined for the today class will be chosen styles for the hasevents class when there is a conflict, styles for the hasevents class will be chosen over styles for the weekend class, and so on.