Sorry for taking a week before replying to this note. We were in the process of approving the release of similar functionality on the unit web sites and I chose to delay my reply until I was sure the new code was going to be deployed.
In general I applaud the effort to offer tools and features to help the rest of us better manage our ecclesiastical responsibilities. My concern with what Stacey has released is related to the pass-through of login information. Giving your username and password to a script is effectively the same thing as giving it to a person. Giving your username and password to someone you know is bad. Giving it to someone you don't know is worse. While the information on a calendar may be harmless, increasingly critical and confidential workflows are going to be available on the web (for example, currently missionary applications can be processed and approved online - other similar efforts are in the works.) We need each person's login credentials to be secure - as they effectively represent their signature. Please help train our leaders how to properly protect those credentials. On the topic of exporting a more usable format from the unit web sites, there should be three new options on the monthly calendar view: csv, ical, and vcal. Take a look and let me know what is broken. For the ical version there is an attempt to deal with the fact that none of the times have timezone information. All times are assumed to be in the local timezone. This is probably a reasonable assumption for most stakes and wards (although I'm sure there are some that span timezones.) The assumption is most likely wrong for church-wide events: those are generally scheduled by someone in SLC and amazingly, there are members of the church living outside of the mountain time-zone. For ical there is a VTIMEZONE definition for US-Mountain at the head of the file and all church-wide events are tagged with that timezone. Let me know if this seems to work properly - it didn't get much testing. The same feature wasn't added to vcal, but can be easily added if someone can verify the format is the same. The repeating events present a unique problem. The format used to store the repetitions is a little convoluted and repetitions are expanded at submission time - so if your event repeats 52 times in a year there are 52 rows created for it in a table. Thankfully, this table only tracks dates and associates them with the event, so the entire event isn't duplicated 52 times... The original expression of the recurrence is stored in the main table so given enough brilliance that could probably be translated into a proper rrule for ical/vcal exports. If people are interested in helping out with this let me know and I'll provide some additional information. I realize it would be nice to add better import functionality... cheers, pete _____________________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, January 27, 2006 1:26 PM To: <ldsoss@lists.ldsoss.org> Subject: [Ldsoss] Stake/Ward Web Site Utilities Hi Y'all: I just found out about this list and recently joined so let me introduce myself first... My name is Stacey and my family and I live in the great state of Texas just north of Dallas. I have been using open source pretty much since the 80's when I was a student and systems programmer running BSD 4.2 Tahoe on VAX 11/780's. Today, some things have not changed... I still use BSD (Mac OS X) on my personal laptop, Gentoo Linux on my MythTV (Tivo-like) box, and use Linux and FreeBSD for work. So let's just say I have been leveraging open source to make my life easier for a long time. I was happy to hear from a friend (Matt Probst) about this list. I hold callings as Stake and Ward Clerks here in Texas. As part of my assignment I keep our stake and ward web pages up to date. This includes the calendar, leadership directories, etc. I also track the usage and schedule our stake building which is a job in itself given we have four but soon to be five wards using the building, not to mention the stake meetings that are scheduled there. In addition, I create programs to help our stake leaders do their jobs. Our stake is very large in both the number of wards and geography. We have 15 wards (after Sunday this will be 16) and our stake boundaries reaches from North of Dallas up and into Oklahoma. Therefore, I stake does not publish a paper stake calendar nor do we publish a stake directory of any sort. We rely totally on the Stake/Ward web sites that the church has provided for this information. (Needless to say, we have saved a lot of money in printing costs.) If you have used the administrator screen on the stake/ward web site that the Church provides you may notice it lacks some features that would be desired. One such feature is the ability to upload a calendar that has been created, with say, outlook. Every year, when we do our planning, our executive secretary creates the calendar in outlook and then hands me the data to upload to the web site. After using the limited input interface on the Church web site provides I decided to create a better way. I wrote a simply perl script that uploads the data from a CSV file. The script acts as web client and inputs the data into the HTML/HTTP forms. This makes publishing a ward/stake calendar a snap. In addition, at the request of our stake presidency, I created software that allows our stake presidency, bishops, and other leaders to download the calendar data to their computers in iCal, vCal, or CSV formats. This allows them to have the calendar in their palm pilots, etc. The script is set up as a web application (perl CGI). They go to a form that is hosted on a web site. Enter in what month they want, which events (Ward, Stake, Churchwide), and what format they would like (iCal, vCal, CSV). In addition, I require them to enter their LDS.org login information. The script uses their login information to access the Church web site so it knows they have access permission to do so. I also created a similar web application for downloading ward directory information. I don't know how the Church office would feel about this kind of software but would like to share the code with the folks subscribed to this list. Be warned, I am not a perl programmer by trade and do most of my programming in the kernel and system level. Therefore, it could use the talents of a real perl programmer to be cleaned up a bit. However, it works great to make my job as a stake/ward clerk easier. I have read on the archive of this list that the Church office doesn't like the idea of "screen scrapers" given the risk of folks using, say, the membership data for something like multi-level marketing campaigns (largely an Utah thing, it seems). Therefore, if the Church doesn't like the idea of me distributing software that does this then I will just keep it for myself and my local leaders to benefit from. If they don't care then I will make it available to the members of this list. Please let me know the offical word about such software. Thanks in advance. Best Regards, -stacey. _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list Ldsoss@lists.ldsoss.org http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. 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