[EventCalendar] Implementing a full-page "big" calendar display

[Matthew Middleton]

I need a large, full-page calendar for a site I am
designing.  I found eventcalendar3 to be the
best-integrated calendar plugin for Wordpress, so I
tested adding such functionality by adding extra CSS
and inserting event descriptions and individual links
into the calendar table itself.

So far, I have only done this to the php generated
calendar - I have yet to do it to javascript-created
calendars produced from the XML feed.

Is such a feature being worked on, or would it benefit
this project for me to contribute my implementation? 
I will need to change things such as the format of the
XML feed.  Additionally, I need to keep track of post
IDs within the PHP functions.  Before I finish my
implementation, I would like to know if anyone else is
working on this, or if there are any preferred
methods/formats I should be using.  (i.e. Should I
create an entirely new XML feed for full-page
calendars?  What conventions should I follow?)

Other things that need to be addressed for this to
work well:
*No functionality to sort events by start time (this
would not be trivial to add, as the event times are
stored in the title by "day.php" - so the internal
functions would need to be changed).
*Page IDs are dropped in internal functions - only the
link to all the day's events are kept.  Each <td/> in
the big calendar needs to contain individual links to
each event.
*The elements of the calendar all use hard-coded IDs,
only allowing one calendar per page
*Various flexibility issues with internal functions;
internal functions need to be updated and documented
with more comments
*The code that appears on the event's blog entry when
displayed on a page or in a category should be
customizable.  Right now, it is a rather inflexible
table on regular pages, and plain text on category
pages.

Things that would be nice to have after basic
functionality implemented:
*A way to create a new post that defaults to an event
on a given day by clicking a "+" button in the big
calendar.
*The big calendar should be able to display "category"
calendars.  For example, all events filed under
"parties" or "fun" could be accessed with
ec3_get_calendar('big','parties,fun') or
http://blog.url/?ec3_big_calendar&category=parties,fun.
*The sidebar widget calendar could have an option for
choosing which categories get displayed there.
*The above two changes would require the php and
javascript to keep track of which categories are being
displayed, and use it when making XML requests or
calling internal functions.


I don't want to do a bunch of massive changes to the
code, only to have it obsoleted by future official
releases.  Hence, before I start any major changes, I
want to seek advice first.  I will submit any
substantial contributions I make to the code back to
the project, of course, under the GPL.

So far, I have only done an initial analysis of the
eventcalendar3 code, so I may be missing some
necessary changes.  As I said, so far I haven't
implemented any of the XML feed changes or javascript
changes to allow the big calendar to download new
events when the month changes.

Also, let me know of any features you would like to
see in a full-page calendar, so I can keep them in
mind with my implementation.