Allow other calendars to post into the tribe calendar

[Jack]

Hi!

First off: LOVE the calendar. We’ve been experimenting with the free version for a while and it’s very complete. Great work!

We’re intending to go PRO, since we’d like to use the calendar on a relatively large scale (pull data into the tribe calendar from aprox. 100 different calendars).

Before we make this jump, I’d like to know if there are features to the calendar that facilitate integration with 3rd party calendars. To put simple: the external calendars would have an added button “send to tribe calendar” when creating a new event. What infrastructure is provided for something like this?

I know detailed answers on this are definitely outside the scope of the support, but was hoping to receive some insight how feasible this is with the current build of the tribe calendar. (for ex. can the API be used for this?)

Thanks in advance!

Jack

[George]

Hey Jack,

First off, thanks for the kind words about the plugin! Glad to hear it’s been helpful to you and working well so far 🙂

As for issues, I’m curious if you can provide a little more detail about exactly what sorts of things you’re looking for? While you’re right that for us to develop an actual solution for pulling in a ton of calendar data might be outside the scope of our support, we can definitely help with as many questions as possible and try to point you in the right direction.

In the meantime, here are some thoughts based on the information you’ve already provided:

First of all, I’m not sure what your external sources will <i>be</i>, exactly, but there are two add-ons we’ve already made and sell for pulling in Events from third parties: Facebook Events and Eventbrite Tickets.

Now, these might fit your needs exactly, but they may serve as great code examples of how to pull in events from third parties.

For example, there’s indeed a PHP class within the core version of The Events Calendar, called Tribe__Events__API in the upcoming release, that is a handy wrapper you can feeding event data to and ensure that they’re created within the WordPress install correctly. This is used, for example, in our own “Community Events” add-on as well.

We do also have a whole team that works on custom enterprise solutions for bigger / more customized implementations of The Events Calendar, or implementations with a lot of external integrations, so that might be worth looking into based on the needs and scope of your project or company as well → https://theeventscalendar.com/for-enterprise/

I hope any of the information I’ve shared here helps!

Cheers,
George

[Jack]

Hi there,

Thanks for the helpful answer! I’m also glad to hear that you guys are willing to provide assistance for as much as it is possible in this case of course.

The tips on the currently existing add-ons are certainly useful, but in this scenario we were more specifically looking for how much customisation would be needed to pull in data from a third party calendar, for example an existing time.ly calendar widget on someone’s website.

More concretely: We would want to add a simple check box to these third party calendars. The checkbox would be visible when the user on the external website creates an event in their own calendar, and with that has the option to add the event they’re about to put in their calendar also to the central Tribe calendar.

Of course we would be writing the code that enables this checkbox to work, but to what extent can we make this possible? Are there existing handles or features in the API that allow for certain functions to be called to push data into a Tribe calendar?

Thanks for the help!

Jack

[George]

Hey Jack,

Hm, the things you mentioned should be possible, but this of course depends on the specific services you try to integrate with and the specifics of how you want things to operate.

For some general ideas/examples, if you have a third-party service that has its own API, you should be able to write some code fairly simply within WordPress that pings that API – a custom plugin, for example. Then within your custom plugin, you could use some of the functions within WordPress Core like wp_remote_get() that should make this a lot easier to do. A function like this returns a body of JSON data from the API you ping, so you could conceivably then take that return JSON data and then pass the data to something like the Tribe__Events__API class I mentioned earlier, or a custom solution of your own that generates an item on your site of the tribe_events post type.

Definitely explore some of the wp_remote_-style functions that are included with Core, and things like the Transient API within WordPress Core so that your third-party API requests only run on set time intervals, instead of something super-bloated like on every page load.

These few ideas alone should get you pretty along, and I hope they do!

Let us know if you’ve got any other questions or concerns, cheers Jack

• This reply was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by George.

[Jack]

Hello George,

Thanks for explaining it so clearly. Very informative, perfect.

I’ve contacted your team to see if they might be able to build a custom solution for us, so I’m in wait for that answer.

Have a great weekend!
Jack

[George]

Glad to hear it Jack! In that case, I’ll go ahead and close up this particular support ticket for now – if other support questions or concerns come up, however, don’t hesitate to come back and open a new ticket!

Hope you have a nice weekend too, cheers Jack!

• This reply was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by George.

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