I was thinking about this more and was getting ready to contact the Group Calendar 5 Author when I saw a post that GC5 works with an OpenRaid.us addon to import calendar information... Whhhhattt?
BLUF: So I went to OpenRaid, and I'm not sure if you know this but you can create a 'virtual guild' of any number of guilds on any number of servers.
How does it work?
You should know that an OpenRaid Guild is not a World of Warcraft guild. You can even use a different name.
To keep it simple: an OpenRaid guild contains one or more World of Warcraft guilds. To explain further:
1. An officer or guild master of a World of Warcraft, can register it as OpenRaid guild.
2. Multiple World of Warcraft guilds can be combined into one big OpenRaid guild.
3. Your guild members that have an OpenRaid account, are automatically added to the guild.
4. You can join OpenRaid guilds without being in the linked World of Warcraft guilds!
5. You can be in multiple guilds, and WoW guilds can be linked to multiple OpenRaid guilds!
** And a Roster of your guild automatically imported from Battle.net.
source:
http://openraid.us/guilds/aboutSo, here is what I was thinking as a starting point.
Probably some problems that I haven't thought of yet, so don't shoot me. I'm also not sure if the Officer Pool has any agreements/feuds with OpenRaid or Group Calendar.
- Create the CTR Megatopolis guild on OpenRaid with the subguilds imported.
- The Event Coordinators create the events as guild events in OpenRaid and mark them as private. This will send the invites to everyone in the "virtual guild" and keep it from being browsed up on OpenRaid by people that are not in the guild.
- I would recommend using the OpenRaid site for the signups, because - why reinvent the wheel?
- OpenRaid also has an addon to make importing the invite list into WOW easier for the Raid Leader(s). They can use this or manually copy the battletags to preform the invites.
- Group Calendar 5 is currently being re-written to correct an import problem with the OpenRaid addon. Once this is done if you have both addons, you can import the OpenRaid events directly into your WoW calendar.
To me the selling point is that you can create on giant CTR guild to put the events into an manage signups. Everything else is nice to have.
This would allow us to have a private area on the OpenRaid site for CTR events that invite all CTR members without spamming each character (since you get one email per account). If players want the event on their in game calendar they can use the OpenRaid addon and Group Calendar 5 once it updates to import it directly or just add it themselves.
IMHO, I know that we have skilled programmers on the team, but why re-invent something that many of us already use and is free for the guild to use. You could use an IFrame on the site to bring the OpenRaid page into the CTR website if you really wanted to but a link to the giant CTR on OpenRaid would probably be just as easy.
I didn't ask OpenRaid support, but I'm guessing that pulling a listing of guild events from the calendar is just a script to produce something like what they have on
http://openraid.us/eventsBackup Info:
- Creating/Editing/Managing Events -
- Getting started with OpenRaid -
- How to use the OpenRaid Addon -
http://openraid.org/addonhowto.pdf