Making a full-sized calendar widget

The typical use for the datepicker widget is to augment a standard form input field. When the field comes into focus, it's then that we want to display the actual datepicker for the user. This makes sense if we're following the standard usage pattern for the widget—to pick dates. This is why, after all, it's called a datepicker.

But we could, however, take advantage of some flexibility afforded by the theme framework and perform a few minor tweaks to display a larger calendar. Not necessarily for the purpose of picking a date as input, but as a large window into date/time related information. The changes we need to make to the widget are merely to scale the inline display up in size.

Getting ready

The datepicker widget already knows how to display itself inline. We just need to call the datepicker constructor on a div element instead of an input element. So we'll use this basic markup:

<div class="calendar"></div>

And a plain old datepicker() invocation...