In my ongoing effort of not re-inventing the wheel, I spent hours upon hours looking through ALL of the available WordPress calendar plugins for a project that I had been working on.

My Needs:

1. AJAX (required asynchronous navigation between months)
2. Query posts by category (would be nice if I could select the category)
3. Associate posts with their dates.
4. Highlight calendar date when a post exists.
5. A tooltip that would display post titles and link to individual posts (past, current, and future) when a highlighted date is selected.

Note: The tooltip would also allow me to display multiple posts per day should that be the case.

The closest thing I was able to come across was the AJAX Calendar by Urban Giraffe, but it returned posts by month and linked to a daily archive if a post existed, instead of the post itself. Kind of close, but not what I needed.

So what’s a guy to do? I gave it a good fight, but I had to make one from scratch.

You can see it in action on the home page sidebar (in rough form)…it’s set up as a widget for now and displaying all posts from the Tips category.

I ended up modifying both the look and functionality once I integrated it onto my clients site: http://trakkersgps.com/blog/

This one took quite a bit of time, but it’s by far the most intricate WordPress site I’ve had the pleasure to work on. And I had a great time doing it!

UPDATE (3/31/2013) – Finally got around to updating/releasing this plugin…read about it here.