Many volunteer programs do not work on fixed dates. For instance, a teacher trying to schedule a guest lecturer is more likely to say "I need a guest speaker from October 15th to November 30th" (i.e., during a certain semester) than "I need a guest speaker on October 23rd."

Similarly, some organizations use volunteers as unpaid staff; e.g., "I need a volunteer graphic designer" (possibly with no time component). (Whether or not CiviVolunteer should support something quite so broad requires some discussion.)

Duration and end-date are not incompatible. These could be used together to declare a need for three hours of volunteering sometime in December, for instance.

Approach

• Add another field to the Need table to collect an end date.
• Add a field and some help text to the Define Need UI to clarify strict scheduling versus "windows" for needs.
• Modify how the vol opps search form works to account for the new field. Modify the Time column in the results table to be a little smarter about how to calculate the datetimes.
• Find instances in which we are calculating an end date from duration and ensure that it is overridden in cases of an explicit end-date.