iCal2Plings and csv2Plings

[David Carpenter]

During the recent rush to get lots of local authority data into the
live Plings system, we need to do some work with spreadsheets and ical
files containing data that needed converting.

We've published the scripts we use to do this, (and a template
spreadsheet we used to help people gather data) on the wiki.

There are plenty of issues raised about gathering, manipulating and
transferring this data around, and really we'd like to see most of
this disappear as data gathering becomes more sophisticated, BUT if
you are faced with data in spreadsheets where you are, or you do have
ical data, then these scripts may be of use to get started.

(We know with ical data that we definitely do not get all the fields
we'd like to see in Plings, so you might use this to do a partial
import, where users then add the missing detail - we wouldn't
necessarily expect a direct import from ical to be of great data
quality)

Anyway, the scripts are here:
(under Code Snippets) http://www.plings.info/wiki/index.php/ICal2Plings

(under Development Tools) http://www.plings.info/wiki/index.php/CSV2Plings

We'd be interested to know if these are of use to people.

Cheers
David