Old Ottawa South

1) The event end time is not showing on the event email. For example, the osca winter carnival email is below, no end time.
2) Also note that in the email, the link "click here" for more info did not carry over.
3) Finally, is there some way to prioritize the OSCA events first in the email and online?
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Sunday, Feb 7 2010 | 11:00 am

Event: OSCA Winter Carnival 2010
Location: Windsor Park
Come out and enjoy the wintery fun! Horsedrawn sleigh rides, Turkey Toss, and more....

Annual Chili Contest: Bring your chili to Windsor Park before noon.

Super Prizes for:

Meat Chili
Vegetarian Chili
Spiciest Chili

For a full schedule of events click here.
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1) This is a shortcoming, we will consider adding "end time" when we have sufficient reason to dig into the code that controls this, realistically it is a minor point so may not happen soon
2) Presume this means that HTML is stripped from event entries as part of newsletter composition. We explicitly do that for one of the front page modules that features an event, so that truncated un-terminated HTML won't wreak the front page layout. That doesn't currently apply to newsletter since it is text only, although there is an option for an HTML newsletter in which case we would have the same problem. The alternative is for event entries to include the explicit URL rather than masking it behind an HTML anchor tag, but that is perhaps too much for the average site user to deal with. Not sure there is a good solution to this
3) There is some merit to this suggestion, how do others feel, is it important to push OSCA events to the front of the list?

(1) I updated our event listing code to include the end time, when available. The results should appear in next week's newsletter.

(2) We strip HTML out of the event details because we are generating a text-only newsletter -- so if the description contains a link of the form:

<a href="someurl">click here</a>

...then all that remains in the newsletter is the "click here" part. That doesn't sound trivial for us to fix. The only reason why some of the links _appear_ to work in the email is that for many links the link text is the same as the href URL, so even after the HTML is stripped there's still a valid URL left behind, and the mail client is recognizing it as such.

If at some point we invest in producing an HTML newsletter, it's possible this problem would go away because we wouldn't need to strip the tags in the first place.

(3) Prioritizing OSCA events:
I guess it could be done. Not sure how hard...doing it properly would mean putting an extra field into the event records in the DB to indicate which are "priority" events. I'm a bit wary of that, because then we really do own the eventlist component. We've done plenty of little code mods as it is, but if we go changing the DB it will be hard to upgrade to another official release.

Re: (3), we don't have to go so far as to modify the Events module, James was asking for that yes but separately for a mod to the newsletter generation. For the the latter just mod the PHP that assembles the events for the newsletter, have the latter order the events first by category OSCA or not, then by date ascending.