Introduction

There are probably as many PHP calendar scripts as there are people to write PHP code,
but I thought I’d throw my really easy to use one in to the mix for anyone who’s interested.
When I was creating the script, I had the following goals in mind:

• It needed to be really easy to use
• It needed to be really easy to visually customize
• It needed to be really easy to hook in to client-side scripting.

Easy to Use

Generating a calendar on a PHP page is as simple as adding the following PHP code:

  
    include "calendar.php";
    $calendar = new Calendar(7, 2011);
    $calendar->render();\n
  

Easy to Visually Customize

That’s really all there is to it. If you should happen to try this example, you might notice that
your calendar leaves quite a bit to be desired visually though. In order to get it looking functional,
we should style the ‘day boxes’ a little bit:

  
    .date_box{
      height: 90px;
      border: 1px solid black;
    }
  

All this does is establish a height for the boxes and gives them a border. Now at least, it looks like
a calendar. There are a lot of other style options, each of which are explained in the included calendar.css
file. That file can also be dropped straight in to give you a reasonable default starting point for styling
your calendar.

Client-side Scripting

99% of the time, if you’ve got a calendar on a page, you need it to be interactive. That interactivity is usually
accomplished using some combination of server-side and browser-side scripting. This calendar script is written
entirely in PHP code, and it doesn’t require any Javascript, but it is “Javascript ready”, in the sense that
all of the vital parts of it are properly id’d and labelled for easy identification in a client-side script.

Slightly More Advanced Usage

It’s hard to call this ‘Advanced’ usage, since the whole thing is really super simple, but I thought I’d go
over a couple of alternative methods for creating your calendar.

Passing Dates to render()

Depending upon your application, it may not be practical to give a date to the calendar upon creation. For
instance, if you’re displaying more than one calendar on a page, you need not create a new calendar instance
for each one. You can simply pass your desired date to the render method of the calendar:

  
    $calender = new Calender();
    $calender->render(7, 2011);
    $calender->render(8, 2011);
  

Setting Calendar Width

One thing that always gets on my nerves with calendar scripts is trying to determine the appropriate dimensions
for each ‘date box’, depending upon the overall width of the calendar. With my script, I try to take some of the
pain out of that process. Simply tell the script how wide, (in pixels), you want the calendar to be, and it will
calculate all internal dimensions for you:

  
    $calender = new Calendar(null, null, 500);
    $calendar->render(7, 2011);