www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology Integrated ByzCath Calendar and Content - Your help needed!

In another thread , I posted the following. Upon further reflection, I decided that it really deserved a subject of its own. If anyone is able and willing to assist in any small way in this venture, please offer your talents. I believe this will benefit all Byzantine Catholics greatly.

I would like to pull together Byzantine Catholic content which will be accessible to any others who wish to use the information (without profit) for their own personal or parish websites. A calendar is one of my specific goals. Please consider assisting the church by adding your talents to this effort.

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I noticed that you said you have an interest in making a Byz Cath calendar, which is one of my goals as well. I desire to make a fully integrated calendar which has the daily lectionary, the saints (with bios), the troparia and kontakia with musical notation, the feasts, the fasts, and the so on. I am currently referencing the following websites to gather together all that info:

Typicon:
http://www.patronagechurch.com/Typicon/2006/Typicon%20Frame.htm

Lectionary:
http://www.archeparchy.ca/liturgy/lectionary.htm

Troparia and Kontakia:
http://users.netmatters.co.uk/davidbryant/C/TropKon/TP.htm

Menaion:
http://www.metropolitancantorinstitute.org/Publications

Synaxarion:
http://www.comeandseeicons.com/icons.htm

Do you (or does anyone else) have any interest on a collaborative effort? It is my goal to make the calendar itself available without charge to any others who wish to use or host it once it is finished. It would make the work much less daunting if it was shared between many.

I�m working a lectionary as part of a long overdue general redesign of byzcath.org. Al the others ideas are excellent but my time resources don�t allow it currently. I am more than willing to collaborate and host anything anyone works on.

John,

Will you be putting the lectionary info into a database (or do you already have it in one) as opposed to flat files?

What we would need is a project set up on: http://sourceforge.net/ which would allow multiple people to work on the project at the same time.

We would need some kind of database whether it is a true database or XML files.

Next we would need to reuse a calendar program like: http://php-calendar.sourceforge.net/

If we did all the above then I think a group effort could be possible.

Yeah!!

The job as I see it:
1. Gather the info together
2. Import the info into the database
3. Create a front-end

First, though, is the checking of copyrights and permissions. What I envision is an actual calendar as well as a search function (day, month, year) which when clicked on (either one) would take the user to a page which listed the day's info in some clear and user-friendly design. Current data topics I can think of include: date, saints commemorated, saint biographies, feasts or fasts celebrated, fasting foods allowed, gospel and epistle readings, troparia and kontakia, musical notations for both. Any other thoughts?

Wondering,

Everything I mentioned above is opensource software. In other words there shouldnt be an copyright issues to address.

Ray,

I was referencing the content itself, specifically the Bible verses, the saint bios, and the musical notations.

Wondering,

Nothing Church related is Copyrighted and anything that might have been Copyrighted, well the copyright expired about 1,000 years ago.

There is nice computerised Menalogion on the Chinese Orthodox website that is good to load down on the computer. Has new and old calendar and readings.

http://www.orthodox.cn/index_en.html

I submitted the project for SourceForge. Hopefully, it will be approved soon.

Oh good! I do know that specific Bible translations are under copyright (and the easiest way to avoid that problem might be linking to the verses on an approved site), but I am not sure about the musical notations by the MCI. That might be copyrighted. If so, I hope they will provide permission for its use as long as they are clearly indicated as the source. (It would be like free advertising for them.) The saint biographies should each fall under the copyrights of those who composed them. I would hope someone would be willing to allow us to use theirs with proper credit given, since we will not be taking any money or in any other way profiting from it. Come to think of it, I think the usage of works with no exchange of goods or services falls into a different category when dealing with copyrights. I'll see what I can find out on the legal end by Monday.

John, do you already have a database set up for the lectionary?

Ok, we now have a spot to do work on the Byzantine Catholic Calendar:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/byzcalendar

Wondering,

No database yet. I�m just to the point of starting the new graphics and layout now that the new structure is determined. All I need is a dozen free hours for a few weeks!

Ray S.,

Excellent! If you have a choice I recommend the ESV (English Standard Version) of the Scriptures. There are ways you can build a database and get it directly from their site at www.esv.com. [esv.com.]

John / Admin

Awesome! Now how do we use it?

I started a database in Excel that has the following information.

1. ID number (just a consecutive count of 366, one for each day of the year)
2. Month
3. Date
4. Year
5. Paschal Cycle
6. Fasts
7. Fasting Foods
8. Feasts and Saints Commemorated
9. Gospel Reading
10. Epistle Reading
11. Tone
12. Troparia
13. Kontakia
14. Synaxarion

So far, numbers 1-8 are fully populated and 9-14 are not. I'm thinking we need a program that will run in the back end to calculate which columns to pull from for a given date. I think it can all be calculated based on the date of Easter so that when the program is done it only needs to know the date of Easter each year to be able to calculate the rest for the year.

I would prefer we make the database using XML [en.wikipedia.org] .

If you are going to put stuff into a spreadsheet I would recommend you download and use: CALC [openoffice.org] . This way you can export the data into XML which we can use as the "database."

Now that we have a repository for the work. I would suggest you save your work into the SourceForge directory.