iCal import from other Events Calendar instance

[Haime]

Hi,

I have a presales question. Basically we would like to have three distinct websites, all with The Events Calendar. The idea is that all events are entered on one website (using Community Events addon) and that the other two websites periodically import specific (category) events from the main one. Is this possible with the iCal Importer? So e.g. website B imports automatically all horseriding events every 30 minutes from website A?

regards,

Haime

[Brook]

Howdy Haime,

This is possible with iCal Importer . We have a mini plugin that makes this much easier to setup: tribe-snippet-ical-export Install that on Website A . This will add a new URL to website A that generates a recently published event iCal feed.

example.com/events/?ical=1&tribe_display=recently-published

You can then input that URL into the importer on Site B and it will import any events that were recently published or modified on Website A. From there select which category of events from Website A you want to import, and it will works its magic on those events.

Does that all make sense? Will that work for you? Please let me know.

Cheers!

– Brook

[Haime]

Brook,

that is great! Awesome plugin!

One last question. The venue is for horseriding and has up to 4 horseriding rings. We would like to use the calendar also to inform the users which ring the event will use (options would be like: no ring (e.g. clubmeeting), outside ring only, outside and inside ring), thus implying which rings are available for free use.

I was thinking of the additional fields to do this, would that make sense? And can these fields be used in the frontend plugin for community events? Basically it would mean the venue has sub-locations. Any tips on how this is usually done?

regards,

Haime

[Brook]

You are welcome!

Typically using Additional Fields would be a perfect solution, but Additional Fields are not part of the iCal format and thus would not transfer from site to site. You might consider using categories or separate venues for this. You can have multiple categories, so a category labeled “Outside ring only” alongside a category labeled “Horseriding” might work. Or you could have a venue labeled “______ Outside ring” for each of the rings.

Does one of those sound like a good option?

• Brook

[Haime Croeze]

Hi Brook,

thanks a lot! I will look into that. I have bought the licenses in the meanwhile and I am testing on my dev sites.

I noticed the iCal importer does not grab all events? I used the additional plugin you mention in the first reply for recently_published, but somehow it will only import stuf of the current month…

continuing with the tests 🙂

best regards,

Haime

[Haime Croeze]

Hi Brook,

I have tested the iCAL importered on recurring events and I think I got the pattern. It seems that the importer function will only import the 1 (original) event and (from end-date recurring back) the last 15 instances.

So I have added a recurring event on july 11 2016, weekly repeat, with end date july 10 2017. The july 11 2016 event is imported as wel as the last 15 recurring events from july 10 2017 back until april 24 2017. The other recurring events between july 2016 and april 2017 are not imported.

Is there a way to increase this amount of iterations?

regards,

Haime

[Brook]

Ahh yes, I should have mentioned that for performance reasons this obeys the “Number of events to show per page” setting in WP-Admin > Events > Settings . So if that is set to 20, it can only import the 20 most recently published events. If you are inserting more than 20 events it will only import 20 of them.

Based on your feedback I created a new version of the the snippet: tribe-snippet-ical-export-2016-07-07 You can updated to this version by performing a manual update ( Tutorial: Manual Update ). This one allows you to set the count for the URL.

I am also working on writing a tutorial for this snippet. It’s not published yet, but this is the relevany portion from that tutorial:
<p style=”padding-left: 30px;”>Typically this feed will output the same number of events as your List View. So if you have set that view to show 10 events, this feed will contain only 10 of the most recently published events. Sometimes you wish for this feed to go further back in history, perhaps to contain every event since your calendar was first published. You can specify how many events are in this feed via the URL:</p>

<pre style=”padding-left: 30px;”>example.com/events/?ical=1&tribe_display=recently-published&tribe_posts_amount=9999

My apologies for the hassle. You are actually the first person to use this snippet. I really appreciate your feedback on it. Does it work better now?

Cheers!

– Brook

 

[Haime Croeze]

Hi Brook,

this is so awesome! I am testing for a new website for the venue. There are two clubs making use of the venue now. So what I did was:

http://mdh.croeze.net is the dev site for the venue
– TEC Pro
– TEC Community Events
– iCal Export Snippet

http://dwh.croeze.net and http://dlk.croeze.net are the test locations for the two club websites, both having:
– TEC Pro
– TEC iCal Importer

and the whole thing just works! 🙂 I am so happy with this, great job!

I need to start testing more with deletes, changes and additions but I just imported 174 events in one swoop on the dwh site… All recurring events 🙂

PS. I was using EM with ESS add-on till now and decided to swith everything to TEC. Mostly because it is such a pain to get EM to look nice in the theme and for the EM Calendar to perform. I have worked now for a long time with WP and php but still, maintenance becomes something to be afraid of if I hack the plugin so much. I really like the responsive little tricks you guys do with TEC. One hurdle is to let go of ESS, that is a much more complete XML interface then iCal (eg will also get the event image!). Why not add it to TEC for TEC2TEC syncs? It is a free standard (http://essfeed.org)

Regards!

Haime

[Brook]

I am stoked it is working as you wanted! Thanks for getting back.

I need to start testing more with deletes, changes and additions but I just imported 174 events in one swoop on the dwh site… All recurring events

One thing I should mention is that iCal is an event creation format, not a deletion one. It contains no information about recently deleted events. Thus deleting an event from one site will not delete it from another.

We are considering an option that would just assume any event no longer present in a feed has been deleted: Option to remove events not present in a reimported iCal feed However that will require your iCal feed to contain every event on the site, potentially thousands of events. And the site which imports it might have trouble attempting to import thousands of events. It all depends on how fast the server is.

For now the best option here is to delete an event from both sites if you need to delete it. Typically people don’t delete events very often, so hopefully that won’t be too much of a manual hassle for now.

PS. I was using EM with ESS add-on till now and decided to swith everything to TEC. Mostly because it is such a pain to get EM to look nice in the theme and for the EM Calendar to perform. I have worked now for a long time with WP and php but still, maintenance becomes something to be afraid of if I hack the plugin so much. I really like the responsive little tricks you guys do with TEC. One hurdle is to let go of ESS, that is a much more complete XML interface then iCal (eg will also get the event image!). Why not add it to TEC for TEC2TEC syncs? It is a free standard (http://essfeed.org)

That’s a great idea! I just added this feature suggestion: Add ESS feed support

Cheers!

– Brook

[Haime Croeze]

Brook,

thanks for the heads up on the deletion part. Stupid of me, should have realized it 🙂 . That is no show-stopper indeed.

Hope the ESS feature suggestion gets a lot of votes! ESS really rocks!

best regards,

a happy customer
Haime

[Brook]

I do too! I have been saying RSS needs a replacement for a long time now. It is very ill suited to events. Thanks for the idea.

It’s been my pleasure Haime. Let us know if you ever need anything else.

• Brook

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