Calendar - from scratch or plugin?
I'm looking to make a scheduling component to my website and all calendars seem to be are grids. That's really it. I have a pretty specific visual confines so if I were to use a plugin... I'd need to be able to adjust the CSS 100%.
Since I'll be doing that anyway, I'm just not sure I see the benefit in these plugins. I see them as follows:
1. Drag and drop events - don't really need that currently. Clicking the event and bring up an "edit" box should work fine. However, how hard is this develop on my own after the fact?
2. Various pop-ups (i.e. view details when click event) - easy to implement on my own
3. Month, Week, Day Layouts - easy to implement display/hide toggling
The only area of the calendar I am currently unsure about is the ability to get the dates to actually line up appropriately and for it to match with the real dates, i.e. it knows that the days all the months start on, which year is a leap year, etc. I briefly discussed this with my partner, who is dealing with the back-end, and he ensured me that this is something he could and would deal with on the back-end. But is there something that I could do on the front-end that these jQuery plugins provide? Or is there something that's easy enough to implement on my own?
If someone could help me think of other benefits of these plugins that I'm missing, that would be great. I don't want to start designing my own calendar and then realize after hours of work that I should have went with a plugin. But the way I see it, once I develop the static grid, that's 80% of the battle on the front-end. The remaining things like toggling views, view detail pop-ups, edit events pop-ups... all very straightforward for me to do on my own. Learning the ins and outs of a specific plugin would seem to be more of a hindrance even. But want to know for sure before I march ahead.
Thanks!