. . . or “How I upgraded WebCalendar from 0.9.4, to 1.0.2”
For those who are paying attention, (as if anyone is really reading this), I have just finished an upgrade to my WebCalendar. This serves two purposes. Mainly, so I can get to my schedule no matter where I am, and second, to let others who would like to know my goings-about, to know what I am up to. I spent a good deal of time yesterday, making the upgrade.
The author of WebCalendar keeps a homepage here, where you can find out the latest news, get information on the product, download, etc. The product is also linked from Sourceforge.net with an immediate re-direct at the moment. It was here that I found updated versions available, and the documentation I needed to get it installed and working properly. Of course, nothing comes cheap, as they say. It was not without some pain and frustration that I finally got it to work.
Upgrade summary:
– Export calendar in iCal format, to local drive
– Use phpMyAdmin to remove all tables from the database
– Delete all old files in the webcalendar directory (note: I had no specially modified pages)
– Install new webcalendar files in old top-level directory (to preserve proper database paths)
– Use phpMyAdmin to execute SQL Query using provided tables-mysql.sql file (this builds the new tables)
– Delete all cookies for WebCalendar (this is a necessary step as authentication has changed)
– Goto the WebCalendar page in a browser
– Configure the administrative options
– Test
– Import iCal file from local hard drive
– Done
The cookies thing was a killer, and actually delayed my success by at least an hour or more. It wasn’t until the next day that I really found out it was all about the cookie, because all I knew, was that after the install, I kept getting a “login” error message, but everything seemed to be fine and checked out. Once I finally closed my browser and re-opened it, all went well. I documented my frustrations and my progress on the Help/Troubleshooting forums at Sourceforge. Not knowing why it worked after closing my browser, I checked the next day and someone had posted a note about cookies. Ah, it all started to make sense.
The rest was pretty straight-forward. You might note, if you are upgrading from a previous version, the upgrade notes suggest you take each version a step at a time. This might be a good idea if you have a huge database and don’t wish to simply download your calendar into an iCal file. Every other upgrade has instructions on performing a bunch of sql table commands, which I would rather just bypass. So I figured I would.
The only information that I really needed to keep, was the actual data in the database for all my appointments. This was easy enough to extract using the export utility in WebCalendar. Once I had the data out, it was simply a matter of using phpMyAdmin to delete all the tables in the database, without actually deleting the database. I had to delete all the old tables because at first, I tried to do the tables-sql query, but got an error about duplicate table entries. Thus, I just deleted the old, then ran the query and the new tables built just fine. From my perspective, this saved a lot of headache trying to perform each table modification, for each release.
Later, after entering the database information in the admin page that first comes up, all I had to do was import the iCal file and everything was restored. Now I had the latest stable release of code, a much sharper looking interface, more options, and I was about to install an RSS feed. Then I hit the cookie problem, but I’ve covered that already.
One of the reasons I had started down the upgrade path, was so that I could use the new RSS Feed feature. Well, as it turns out, the latest stable release does not contain the RSS feed code yet; the beta of 1.1 does. Not wishing to play with an unkown quantity (the unreleased version), I decided to at least move up to the latest stable version. I also found they had perfected an RSS php script that would be integrated to the next release. Well, there it was.
I downloaded and installed the rss.php file to the root of my WebCalendar. I changed the default user from __public__ to my username, and then had to enable public access in the administration panel, and in my personal settings panel. I also enabled the header file, and edited it to include the RSS feed code. Once that was all accomplished, the RSS feed appeared in the address bar of Firefox. I was able to successfully add it to my bookmarks, and it displays the next 10 events. It looks like it works as advertised. I’m very pleased.
In summary, I now have an upgraded WebCalendar, with RSS feed. Very cool.
Asa Jay
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