I am creating a site for my son and his wife at www.namsan.co.uk featuring their holiday home in the UK. I need to include an availability calendar which they (without any website experience) can amend as time goes by. The calendar needs to show dates booked and dates available and the price for any given week. This means the flash calendar isn't satisfactory.

The solution I'm considering is to create a page which includes a jpg image of the calendar. which they could amend and then FTP to the site. We considered using a pdf but AFAIK this displays in a separate window and not as an integral part of a page.

Am I correct in thinking that provided they used the same name the jpg image part of the page would be changed dynamically on the site?

Alternatively is there a simpler, more elegant solution?

I ought to add that they wish to maintain the calendar partly to avoid causing me work and also because they live in Korea and I am in UK!

If it was a normal html page it might work but I'm not sure if that will work in VSD.

I think VSD renames the images as you add them. Unfortunately I can't open my VSD program at the moment to check.

It might be safer to save the updated image to the VSD folder on their PC and then re-upload using the VSD program. That way they could be sure it would all be named correctly and work.

That would mean they would need a copy of the program too.

Hopefully someone will pop in and confirm whether this is the best way to go or not.

What about if you set up the CC Calendar on the site for them, then have them download/install the CC Calendar program on their computer. Then you could email the file you created and the FTP info. Then they can make the changes and send them right from the calendar program. Your desk top version of the site would show the original calendar in a preview, but the file on the server would be getting updated.

The Calendar is like the form builder, photo gallery... in VSD you use the add flash tool to create a "box" that holds the item in that webpage - but you don't edit the item in VSD, that's done in the other program anyway. Then the changes can be FTP'ed to the website right out of the program, no need to go back to VSD. The changed file will replace whatever is in that html/flash "box".

You could do as described regardless of how you created the site, so long as you named the new image exactly the same as the old and you didn't do any re-publishing via VSD, which would over-write the new image.

The problem I see is after you FTP the new calendar people would have to know to shift-refresh the page or else they would still see the old one via browser cache. Very prone to folks not seeing updates, I'd think.

Are there any good calendar programs out there (besides the very good CC one) that would permit outside agents to log in and make changes? I expect there'd be several options, though maybe not free. That being said, if your friends have to buy the CC app so they can make their own updates that's not free, either.

Spinny, I haven't come across the need for browser refreshing you mention. Whenever I change something I check it on all the computers in the house (various operating systems and browsers), the changes are immediate. I had no idea something like that could be going on.

Googling for web calendars turned this up:

http://www.availcheck.com/

It's for vacation properties - might be worth a look

This one is free, but might be more complicated than you want,, it has users, groups and personal calendars.
http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php
I have a sample one installed here
http://www.onelakesideweb.com/demo_site … /month.php

Many thanks to everyone for such quick and helpful replies. As far as I'm aware all pages on all sites are liable to the cached image problem though I always recommend that people set their browser to check for the latest image anyway.

The upgraded version of the recommendation from paintbrush looks very appropriate provided I can bring it into VSD OK.

Once again many thanks

Philip