Hi smet
It's OK - you don't have to be even a newbie at programming
When you ask for examples do you mean how to make the changes or what the changes are? I assume that you mean the latter - in which case while I could make some screenshots, there's not that much to show. (But if I find some time I'll make some anyway and add them to my page). The big changes are in the content of exported ical and the processing of imported ical. As far as I can recall right now, the visible changes are limited to:
- extra options for the calendar feed link, when displayed
- changes to the time zone selector
- a "location" field in calendar entries right by the time/duration
The time zone selector in standard Feng Office offers options like GMT-1, GMT, GMT+1 etc. Installing my patch replaces that with a list of time zones like Europe/London, Europe/Paris, America/New_York - and Feng Office gets the offset for each date as required. It will know that between certain dates the offset is GMT+/-y and the rest of the time it's GMT+/-x.
The database changes can be made using any tool you like which is capable of running those sorts of queries on the database. phpmyadmin is one option but I'm sure there are other ways you can do it.
Your data should be perfectly safe; the database script doesn't touch any existing columns - it only adds four new ones. That said, make a database backup anyway! Also (if I recall correctly) until you select a named time zone, your users'/contacts' existing time zone offset settings will continue to be honoured, so you won't be immediately defaulted to UTC/GMT.
I think I understand what you might mean by patching the system on-line. I'm afraid I don't know how to do that. What I would suggest is to unpack the standard distribution twice, prepare one of the sets of files according to the instructions, and compare it to the other to find out which specific files are different and need to be uploaded. Alternatively perhaps your FTP program can do a comparison and tell you whch files are different to what you already have on-line.
I hope that helps - I'll be happy to hear any further questions