Pop Out Calendar

I am working on my Final Year Project at University.

For this project I have to build an adaptive website. And one of the adaptive features that I am going to include date adaptions. So when the user clicks a different date the website will change its contents and theme to that date.

e.g. if a user clicks 25th December, It will be a christmas theme.

I currently have a button with the text 'Change Date'. I want to make a pop out calendar, which appears when the button is clicked.

Ideally I would like to use PHP, but I understand this may not be ideal.

What I am looking for is any hints, tips, useful links that may be of use to me and any solutions that any one is willing to share.

Thanks for any help.

EDIT: Any Ideas on ho开发者_如何转开发w I could code this myself or tutorials would be nice, but other suggestions welcome. Even any alternatives welcomed. Thanks.

EDIT 2: Also , the calendar needs to be able to adapt. i.e. if the user is visiting from china it needs to allow for differences in time between various locations.

Having done UI for several years, I'd recommend doing this interaction on the front end, so you could use any server-side language to support what you're doing. My personal preference for a front-end framework is Jquery due to its great documentation, adherence to proper standards, and simplicity.

For the calendar, Jquery has a native Jquery UI plugin to do popup calendars that I believe are the industry standard today. They populate standard HTML text input fields that can then be passed to PHP via a submit (or via Jquery's ajax) to do with what you like. Depending on the setup of your page, it could be a matter of one line of code to accomplish a well-designed, interactive popup calendar.

As for changing themes, ThemeRoller (part of Jquery UI) is absolutely awesome. I use it in all my online applications. When my company private labels a site, I can simply change one folder of graphics and one CSS file and my entire site's color scheme has changed, automatically. You can even change on the fly with some simple syntax. It's fast, clean, and gracefully degrades to support legacy browsers. If you dig into the markup, you can actually use themeroller to theme any website, so when making a change every part of the site changes accordingly. In my mind, you can't possibly go wrong with this method.

Good luck.