Interview: Creating personalized photocalendars from the back stage

What does creating personalized photo calendars look like from backstage? I’m interviewing Pawel – Developer in Printbox.

Kasia Michalowska: What does adding holidays look like from the developer’s point of view?

Pawel: When using professional photo calendar software, we have an object that holds within itself all things that can be parameterized for such a holiday: name:String; color:uint; colorIsSet:B; iconName:Str; iconColor:ui; range: 1-31; date:int; range: 1-12; month:int; year:int; prevXML:XML; prevYear:int; prevMonth:in; prevDate:in; textFormat.
Most of them take particular values, like number, text, XML, etc. Besides the textFormat parameter, which describes what you want your text to look like, on your special occasion (font, size, color, etc.). In the “your celebrations” window basically, all of the controls are used to edit these values for holidays. The list shows all the important dates that are assigned to the XML project.

K.M: In other words, the end-user creates holidays and you get an output file in which you have all this information to reproduce it, right?

P.: Not exactly. The calendar, on the pages, is displayed by a specific component. One for all pages. This calendar has an array of all holidays created by the end-user. As the user adds another special date to his holidays, the date is automatically added to this component. The final XML file is not generated until the project is saved. And then, when the end-user opens this project in the editor, all the holidays are added from the XML file to the component.

K.M: If I have my holidays in a calendar filled in one year, can I get another calendar with the same holidays next year? Are my special dates stored somewhere?

P.: They are stored, but in your saved project, so in the calendar for the previous year. They will be on the list but you will need to manually change each date for another year. If you create a new project, you will have to add those holidays one more time. Your holidays are assigned to the project, not to your account. But don’t worry, this solution will be evolving and soon we will be changing this mechanism to better reflect our end user’s needs.

K.M: Is there anything else interesting to describe in the photo calendar production? Any interesting facts?

P.: The photo calendar spring is created in the editor automatically from 3 separate elements. But you can also upload your own file to have it personalized. You can also define bleeds in the photo calendar.

K.M: And àpropos the spring, I know that Printbox provides for another type of calendars than a3 and a4 vertical. So our partners can offer horizontal or kitchen calendars.

P.: Yes. The workspace is the limit. It’s fine even if you want to create a calendar that has dimensions of 1m x 1m. You can also turn off the calendar.

K.M: What do you mean? A calendar without a calendar?

P.: There are companies that want to have everything unique and prepare their own template and the calendar is the graphics they upload as a background. There are 4 types of calendars that you can implement into the design. You can also set all kinds of text styles, colors and size, etc.
The only thing you have to remember is that not every font works with national characters, like the Cyrillic alphabet for instance. So it could happen that you can’t see the names of the days of the week.

K.M: Ok. Thank you.