FlatCalendarXP and PopCalendarXP do calendaring right

As you may have noticed from previous issues of the Network World Web Applications newsletter, I have been searching for Web calendaring products in a quest to find ones that not only work well but also look good. The latter quality is extremely important – so many calendars work well but they look, well, hideous is as good a description as any.

Today I have a pair of good-looking Web calendar systems that not only work well but also are also extremely flexible. The products, from Idemfactor Solutions, are FlatCalendarXP and PopCalendarXP – the “XP” in both cases apparently stands for “eXtremely Perfect” (these developers are nothing if not bold).

Both calendars are JavaScript-based with database-driven event handling, have cross-browser capability, customizable UIs, and easy-to-use designs. They also work with sites that use ASP.Net, ASP, JSP, PHP, ColdFusion and other Web frameworks.

FlatCalendarXP is designed for in-line Web page use – in other words, for calendars that are displayed as part of the page. PopCalendarXP on the other hand is a calendar designed to pop up when a date picking field is the focus of data entry.

Both products can have customized “skins” and the main “engine” that drives the calendars is only around 23K bytes in size. Effects for highlighting selected dates, today, agendas, holidays are provided as is visual strike-out of disabled dates and dynamic date range support (so that users can’t select a date in an end date field this is before a start date previously selected in another instance of PopCalendarXP – a similar constraint applies if the end date is chosen first).

Agendas can be retrieved from either a script file or a back-end database and contextual agenda messages can be shown in either or both the status-bar and tool tips. There is also holiday support and a plug-in system for advanced custom functions.

Pricing for either product starts at $75 for implementation on a registered domain or hostname or IP address. Use on multiple subdomains under a single domain plus an intranet is $299, while the multi-domain inter- and intranet license with royalty-free distribution rights is priced $999 (see here for license terms). There’s also a free version for non-commercial use that displays the vendor’s banner in the status bar and provides less broad browser support.