After a stunning 55,000 downloads of vlaCalendar version 2 and two years after vlaCalendar version 1, the Vista-like Ajax Calendar is finally ready for its successor, Calender Eightysix!

Where the vlaCalendar fails, having disadvantages like making use of AJAX and PHP, Calendar Eightysix succeeds; being completely build from scratch with pure javascript, making use of some of the superb features the latest MooTools javascript framework has to offer.

Calendar Eightysix is an unobtrusive developer friendly javascript calendar and datepicker offering a better user experience for date related functionalities.

Key features:

• Quick navigation by jumping back and forth between months, years and decades without drop-down boxes
• Highly and easily customizable
• Packed with three themes
• Lightweight (9.5 kB compressed)
• Purely javascript; AJAX-less and no PHP needed

Examples, documentation and the download are available here.

Update November 11, 2009: Version 1.0.1 released, minor bugs fixed.

After eight months of traveling I'm finally back home. During this time I didn't have much time to help with problems regarding the vlaCalendar. My excuse for that. I'm aware of the problems with the calendar regarding the Client-side Extension and regarding IE8.

I've decided not to provide any more support for the vlaCalendar - perhaps besides some quick fixes - and focus on a completely new version branded as 'Calendar Eightysix'. Calendar Eightysix will be ajax-less, better customizable and will have more features. Drop feature requests in the comments.

After dozens of emails and comments regarding commercial use of the calendar I've decided to provide a commercial license for the Vista-like Ajax Calendar. The license includes vlaCalendar version 1, version 2 and the client-side extension version 1. Examples of commercial use include:

• websites with any advertisements;
• websites owned or operated by corporations;
• websites designed to promote other products, such as a band or artist; and,
• products (e.g. a CMS) that bundle the vlaCalendar into its offering.

With this license Commercial entities can:

• use the vlaCalendar on their websites and can include it in applications; and,
• use altered versions of the vlaCalendar - but they cannot distribute or sell those alterations or the original code.

You can view and purchase the license here.

Here's a handy little function for easing the development process with Actionscript 3 in Flex and Flash: an equivalent of PHP's recursive print function print_r, which displays objects and arrays in a way that's readable by humans.

The initial vlaCalendar was developed for use with database data. So the calendar uses AJAX calls to PHP parsed documents. This made the calendar only usable for users who have a PHP server.

Huy Do and I developed an extension that makes the vlaCalendar AJAX-less, and thus PHP-less: the client-side only extension for vlaCalendar v2.1.

A new version of my Vista-like Ajax Calendar (vlaCalendar) has been released:
version 2.1 is made compatible with MooTools installment, version 1.2, and offers some new features:

Today is the Firefox 3 download day: Help Mozilla to set a Guinness World Record by downloading Firefox 3 by 11:16 a.m. PDT (18:16 UTC) today.

The initial start time was 19:16 on 17th of June but due to heavy server load on the start of the download day servers went down. Anywho the servers are back up. At the time of writing the counter is at 5,700,000 total downloads!

It's faster, more secure, has more performance, has more features (working zoom, unlike IE7...), and is better personalizable. What are you waiting for?

Grab Firebug for Firefox 3 while you're at it.

Update: The download day is over and they exceeded 8 million downloads in a 24 hour period! Guinness World Records is currently validating the record attempt.
Update: How sweet, the IE team send a cake.
Update July 3, 2008: 'We' set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours with 8,002,530 downloads.

At first I wanted to make the vlaCalendar compatible with mootools 1.2 when its gets out of beta stage. After receiving lot of emails and comments from people wanting to use the calendar with the beta version, I decided to make vlaCalender v2 also compatible with mootools 1.2 beta2!

New mootools 1.2 beta2 compatible files are added to the download packages.

Update June 10, 2008: Working on mootools release 1.2 compatibility
Update July 2, 2008: vlaCalendar version 2.1 released, compatible with mootools release 1.2