We're now working on the Event Reminders hack for piCal.

Here is what the piCal module will do with Marcan's modifications :

- A user will be able to subscribe to a new notification allowing him to be
notified xx Days before an event start. (XX will be customizable as a config option.) This notification could be set for all events (Global Reminder), for a specific category (Category Reminder) or for a specific event (Event Reminder).

- A cron job will have to be set to be executed each day, for example at
00:00 AM.

- At that time, a script will be executed.

- This script will list all events starting in the next 24 hours.

- It will then list all users who subscribed to the Global Reminder
notification and will send them a notification for each event listed
previously

- The script will then list all users who subscribed to the Category
Reminder notification and will send them a notification for each event
corresponding to the category they subscribed for.

- Finally, it will list all users who subscribed to the Event Reminder and
will send them a notification for each event.

- The text of the notification will use a mail template that you could
customize in piCal/language/english/mail_template

- Unfortunately, the notification cannot be sent in the language of the user
as the way the notification architecture is currently, this cannot be done.
The notification will be sent in 1 language. (default site language). However, the workaround for this is to put as many languages as necessary in the one mail template. For example :

-----French-----
Voici la notification en fran軋is....

-----English Version-----
Here is the notification text in english....

- The XOOPS notification architecture will be used as a base for this so
users can subscribe and unsubscriibed to these notifications as they
normally do.

The above will be accomplished with the budget we have. Hopefully within the next few weeks.

If others are willing to contribute some funds to our budget we could also accomplish the following:

- Users who susbcribed to both a global and a category reminder will receive notifiations twice. This could be prevented in the script. If only we had more budget.

- Add two reminder notifications options, both admin configurable: One for advance timeframe (like 1 day) and one for a longer period of time (like 7 days). Again if we just had some more money.

Did I mention we need some more contributions from the community?