iCal Importer or Event Aggregator for Central Events Calendar on Multisite

[Mark Jacobson]

Hello Modern Tribe,

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is creating an online campus events calendar. Our website is hosted on WordPress multisite and The Events Calendar Pro is being used for publishing event content. We are considering using using Modern Tribe’s iCal Importer or Event Aggregator to aggregate event content from within select sites within our WordPress multisite and display them together in another site on the network. This site would then serve as the University’s Campus Events Calendar.

I have a few pre-sales questions for you:

1. Which plugin add-on would be most appropriate for the above use case: iCal Importer or Event Aggregator?

2. Do you expect to end support for iCal Importer at some point in the future, in favor of Event Aggregator?

3. Is Event Aggregator a hosted service or a plugin that we would install on our WordPress multisite installation?

4. Does iCal Importer or Event Aggregator support importing URLs of featured images, so that our Campus Events Calendar can display featured images for events?

5. Do the iCal Importer and Event Aggregator licenses include support for test and development environments, in addition to a production (live) environment? Does it also include support for developers who need to do locally-hosted (i.e. 127.0.0.1) development for use cases such as theme development that affects the display of The Events Calendar Pro content.

Thank you in advance for your time.

Regards,

Mark

[Geoff]

Hello Mark,

Thanks so much for reaching out! I am really excited you and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee are not only already using The Events Calendar and Events Calendar PRO, but considering making the jump to an importing solution as well. That’s awesome!

These are great questions. I’ll start of by saying I would absolutely recommend Event Aggregator over iCal Importer. We are continuing to support iCal Importer with maintenance releases but are going to discontinue new feature development down the road with the expectation that Event Aggregator will fully replace it.

As far as your three other questions:

3. Is Event Aggregator a hosted service or a plugin that we would install on our WordPress multisite installation?

Event Aggregator is indeed a hosted service and is already installed on your site if you are running The Events Calendar 4.3+. the only requirement to get started is to purchase a license which, when entered, will unlock the service when you access the Events > Import screen in The Events Calendar.

4. Does iCal Importer or Event Aggregator support importing URLs of featured images, so that our Campus Events Calendar can display featured images for events?

Absolutely. Event Aggregator will import images along with the event data as long as an image is available to import.

5. Do the iCal Importer and Event Aggregator licenses include support for test and development environments, in addition to a production (live) environment?

An Event Aggregator license can be installed on up to 10 sites, so you should be well covered there. However, you can always deactivate the license on one site and move it to another temporarily, should you need another seat to test something out.

I will note that each configured import, whether it is on a staging or production site, does count toward the 100 import limit. And, by 100 imports, I mean 100 scheduled imports rather than 100 imported events. 🙂

Does this help answer your questions? Let me know if I can clarify anything here or if you have other questions and I’d be happy to help.

Cheers,
Geoff

[Mark Jacobson]

Hello Modern Tribe,

Thank you for your response to my previous questions. I have one additional question.

To clarify on your response to my previous question 4 (“Does iCal Importer or Event Aggregator support importing URLs of featured images”):

Will Event Aggregator import The Events Calendar featured images (https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/featured-images/) from The Events Calendar content on WordPress websites?

Thank you,

Mark

[Geoff]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for following up!

That’s a good clarification to make: featured images will only be imported from Facebook and Meetup. Importing events from another WordPress site (even one running The Events Calendar) use the iCal method of importing, which does not contain the image information needed to pull a featured image in with an import.

Cheers,
Geoff

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

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