This is me thinking out loud about it and wondering if anyone has better suggestions that I haven't thought of.
Sometimes we have two events per day (an early event and a late event) and those are designated by the early event having "a" appended to it, e.g.:
- /calendar/2012/09-14a: Mortified, 8pm - 9:30pm;
- /calendar/2012/09-14: Hubba Hubba Revue, 9:30pm - 2am.
We never have three events per day in the same room. At least, it hasn't happened in 11 years so I'm not worried about it.
It used to be that I would have labelled those two events as "09-14" and "09-14b", but that was dumb because it meant that if we booked the later event first, and the earlier event second, then the URL for the later event had to change, and all the old links to it broke. So I had a Flag Day and changed that a few years back. Now the "a" designation is applied if a daytime event has an end-time before 10:30pm, meaning it's conceivable that we could end up booking an event after it. This is based on what we've actually seen in the real world, and now our URLs are stable.
Anyway, we're opening a new space, and so now we can permute that to four new kinds of events!
- DNA Lounge, Early (09-14a)
- DNA Lounge, Late (09-14)
- Above DNA, Early
- Above DNA, Late
- Both venues combined, Early
- Both venues combined, Late
(It is not logistically possible to run separate events in the front room and back room of DNA Lounge, or to run separate events in the front room and back room of Above DNA, so there's no need to worry about those cases.)
So I need to decide how to label those URLs, and I'd like to get it right the first time so that I don't have to break URLs again later.
So far I'm toward using "c" and "d" for #3 and 4 above, and treating #5 and #6 as synonyms for #1 and #2 (meaning: a four-room event looks, URL-wise, like a DNA Lounge-only event where Above DNA is closed). (The "b" is silent.)
I'm not crazy about the "c/d" thing because it means that URLs for every night-time stand-alone show in the Above DNA space -- which will be by far the most common case up there -- will look like /calendar/2012/11-09d.html, and what's that "d" doing there? It's just kind of a wart.
I do want them to be the same calendar, and not living on two different web sites, because we're branding it as one venue that has two performance spaces, not two separate venues. Also, every Saturday night, Bootie will be in both rooms, so right off the bat we're running "combined" a large chunk of the time.
Any other non-warty suggestions?
Next!
The other thing that really bums me out is that I think it means my calendar can no longer be a Cartesian grid. I was really pleased when I figured out how to make the calendar resize when the window is resized and yet cause all the cells to remain square. Because calendar cells should be square, dammit. When there are two events on one day, it splits the cell vertically. But now there are potentially four events on the same day. How the hell do I display that and keep the cells square and the text readable? I think I can't, and I'm going to have to make the "week" lines be two lines high.
I do not like that.
But I also don't like having two grids, one for each room, and that's pretty much the only other option. (A vertical split would not play nicely with text wrapping.)
Any other ideas there?
