When I first started working on Zvents, I didn’t have a full appreciation for the subtle differences between public events and personal events/calendaring. Since both public events and personal events are typically presented visually to users with a calendar, we can probably treat them identically, right?

Wrong. We quickly encountered many differences between them as we developed our data model and UI. One major area where public and private events are different are in their repeat patterns. Repeating events are a very important feature for both personal and public events. In the case of public event search, it’s important to collapse repeating events into a single entry in your search results (unless otherwise requested) otherwise they tend to dominate the results. Whether an event belongs to a repeating series also impacts relevance scores.

When we first added repeating events to Zvents, we did a quick survey of the repeating events UI in use in many popular applications (Outlook, Yahoo! Calendar, etc.) We settled on a combined approach, similar to the one used in each of these programs. It turned out, however, that this model wasn’t a good fit for the public events space since public events tend to recur at much higher frequencies and using much more complex recurrence patterns. A play or movie often recurs at multiple times within a single day, often at different venues. None of the recurrence models in standard personal calendaring programs could adequately represent these patterns.

We just enhanced our model to handle the complexities outlined above. It is now possible to associate multiple repeat patterns with an event. It means the UI for entering events is slightly more complex, but we think the additional flexibility is well worth it. check it out on the event promotion page.

-Shane

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