Incorporate calendar events

The lesson schedule should automatically show events relevant to lesson scheduling. For example, on weeks where General Conference, Stake Conference, etc. fall, it should show that in the year view by default.

That's a nice feature request, but at the end of the day, someone in the local unit has to fill that information in. It would require quite a bit of programming and training of the users on how this feature would connect between the two programs. I'm not sure as it would save much effort.

In the old system I manually entered that stuff in before I started on the lessons.

Russell, I don't quite agree with you on your point. Why would it require training for users? Their lesson scheduler would automatically pull info that it receives from the Stake & Ward Calendar. With a little work from the Calendar developers and the lessons scheduler developers, you'd have a lesson scheduler that would pre-populate days with stake conference and other things (with over-ride functionality as well). That's the beauty of php and a CMS.

Yes, someone in a local ward or stake unit has to put Stake Conferences and other things into the Calendar, but why have people enter those things in multiple times? Why not integrate the Calendar system as found on lds.org with the lesson scheduler. The Lesson scheduler is in essence, just a calendar that allows you to add predefined links to manuals and lessons. I think integration is the key that will help people want to use this system, otherwise people will just use other means to plan their lessons.

How would the system know to bring over just general, Stake, and Ward conference but ignore youth and singles conference?

There aren't many events in a given year that cancel out regular lessons. You can add them using the "Add Event" feature and select which classes are cancelled because of the event. I think this works just fine (but since the whole thing is a little buggy at the moment, I'd wait until you know it works for you and then see if it's sufficient).

I agree. There's not that many events that preempt a class. It's pretty easy to add them in. My vote is to keep it the way it is.

mrrad wrote:There aren't many events in a given year that cancel out regular lessons. You can add them using the "Add Event" feature and select which classes are cancelled because of the event. I think this works just fine (but since the whole thing is a little buggy at the moment, I'd wait until you know it works for you and then see if it's sufficient).

During the early stage of this project, we looked for ways to integrate it with the Calendar. The bottom line is as Russell described. We don't know which individual calendars will hold the relevant events, and we don't know which events on that calendar are relevant to lessons, so it would all need to be manually configured by an admin anyway. So we decided to just let the users create the events manually, since they'd be doing nearly the same amount of work anyway.

how about a link on the calendar page to the lesson page. then it would be easy to look at the calendar then just click to goto the lesson page for that days lesson.

The calendar events don't have to preempt lessons. It would just make a lot of sense to have it show events in the year view. If the events affect the lesson schedule, then the person doing the scheduling will adjust. If the events don't conflict, then the admin can schedule the lesson as usual.