August 6, 2004

5:38 PM

I build a lot of "community" sites - that is, not web communities, but websites that support specific communities. So I'm hunting around for a good set of decent and free PHP/MySQL scripts to do the sorts of things these communities often demand. Now up? A public events calendar and classified ads. AskMeFi has helped before, so hat in hand, I come back to the well hoping for more. [More Inside]
posted by pzarquon to (3 comments total)

For the calendar, I've used phpCommunityCalendar, which is barebones but functional. For classified ads, after actually paying for another solution that turned out to really suck, I started using zClassifieds (looks like the developer's site is gone). Both haven't been updated in over two years. Right now I'm testing ExtCal, which looks promising but still isn't quite what I'm looking for.

For both, I'm looking for a built-in user login system, good moderation (i.e. ban) capabilities, image support, and, of course, free (or nearly free).

I think the classified ads script space is pretty crowded, so if anyone has any experience with a particular program, I'd love to hear about it. As for a calendar, the setup I like most is the one used by VegasEventsOnline.net... but theirs cost five figures to license!
posted by pzarquon at 5:45 PM on August 6, 2004

I emailed you offline, but forgot to address the some of your requirements.

- banning: my webhost offers an IP banning capability that I can use with any online app, so that wasn't an issue for me
- image support: not sure what you mean, but the solutions I use all allow good graphic integeration (custom header, footer and CSS styling)
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 7:07 AM on August 7, 2004

Hey, SSF, thanks for the e-mail! Just so I don't lose them, and because it just might help someone else, the other solutions were WebCalendar and Noah's Classified. WebCalendar looks like a CGI-based calendar I've seen deployed all over. Noah's Classifieds sure looks sharp, so I'll definitely have to play with that.

IP banning is one solution, but of course, like with comment spam on blogs, they only need to get in once to cause trouble. I'd really like to be able to automatically ban any classified ad that offers jobs for ad placers, work from home, ad nauseum...

As for image support, I meant more allowing submitters to include images in their listings. (See the Vegas site I mentioned.) The reason I like ExtCal is because their "flyer" presentation of the calendar - in addition to the "traditional" calendar view - offers a more visual and roomy presentation of event information rather than small print in boxes.
posted by pzarquon at 10:43 AM on August 7, 2004