iCal subscription/feed

[Erica]

When can we expect this feature? To be clear, I am NOT asking about the “export month’s events” — my users need to be able to *subscribe* to an iCal feed, such that their calendar app is updated every time we post a new event on the site.

I see over on tribe.uservoice.com this is one of the most highly requested features, since 2012. Are you planning to add it? When?

[Josh]

Hey Erica,

Thanks for reaching out to us!

We do have an option that you could pursue that would most likely work for what you’re trying to accomplish here.

The default option would be to supply the built-in iCal feed to users to add to their systems for regular import (http://example.com/events/?ical=1) however the feed only shows the current month and wouldn’t update as you add new events.

Alternatively, you could add the following to your site’s functions.php file or within a custom snippets plugin to extend the iCal feed to show events for the entire year:

https://gist.github.com/cliffordp/ab1f7c4d95723ee6f892

You could then supply “http://example.com/events/?ical=1&year-feed=1” for your visitors to subscriber and they would be able to import all events for the upcoming year.

Let me know if this helps.

Thanks!

[Erica]

Hi Josh,

Unfortunately, that does not fix the problem. Our members are constantly adding new events to the calendar, throughout the year — it’s a community calendar, and people are always organizing new events. We could allow members to import a year in advance, five years in advance, it doesn’t matter, since during that next year we’ll get maybe 100 new events added to the calendar. Our members want these new events automatically added to their own personal calendars, without having to constantly check our website. This is how Google calendar subscriptions work, and how iCal subscriptions work, on many, many sites.

I’ve seen in the support threads I mentioned (on tribe.uservoice.com) that this issue is clearly on your radar, and has been for years — when can we expect it to be added to the plugin?

Thanks,
Erica

[Chris Thomas]

So I have this same need; if I replace the http:// with a webcal:// for the feed link, it seems to work fairly well (even after events are added).

Am I missing something? It seems to work fairly well.

Now having said that, I would appreciate Josh’s insight in suggesting how to best modify the link code in the framework to push out the “webcal” link automatically (instead of the http link). I’ve tracked the code to hell and back, something I don’t quite understand is going on and transforming the URL and stripping the webcal I keep trying to inject.

The 365-day extended code snippet you just shared seems pretty handy; marrying it with the webcal protocol seems to be a viable solution. ?!?

[Josh]

Hey Chris,

Thanks for reaching out here! Would you mind opening a new thread for this particular request? This will allow us to answer all questions and each person fully within the thread. We’d be happy to help get you pointed in the right direction there.

Erica,

What Chris suggests here sounds like it would be the best solution for what you’re looking for here. Users can subscribe to the year-feed version of the webcal:// feed and they would get a full year of available events and would be “subscribed” to that feed within their calendar system.

Let me know if this helps.

Thanks!

[Erica]

So, the webcal thing does work, but only for the time period specified, as far as I can tell. So I can give my members a webcal link for the next year (let’s say the calendar year 2017 just for discussion’s sake), and within that year, their personal calendar will automatically update with events as they are added.

The problem is that events in 2018, or beyond, will not be automatically added. They will need to go back to the site and re-subscribe to the next year’s events. If I’m missing something here, please let me know, but testing indicates this is how it works.

This is not the solution we are looking for. We are looking for a true calendar subscription, which the user adds ONCE to their calendar, and then never has to touch again.

[Josh]

Hey Erica,

The user will only need to add the link once. The feed generated with the “year-feed=1” portion added to the URL will be a year from today. So, every time events are fetched or updated from their calendar it will be 1 year from the day that it is fetching.

If a user adds the calendar today, it will fetch events all the way to December 2017. When the calendar fetches more events a month from now, it will pull events all the way to January 2018.

Let me know if this helps.

Thanks!

[Leonardo]

Hi all,

I need EXACTLY what Erica is looking for. I like Events Calendar very much, but the absence of the ability for someone to subscribe to the ical feed is bringing me to the verge of a nervous breakdown and I am considering moving to another WP plugin, just for the absence of this feature.

My question is: with the solution that is being proposed above, would users that subscribe to my Events Calendar be able to see the events on their personal calendars? Crucially, let’s say they subscribe and can see all the events on their Google Calendar on their phones. If I then make a change to an event on my website – such as a change of schedule or renaming an event – would that change be reflected in the users’ personal calendar?

In other words, if I create “Event X” @7pm on my website, and then change the time to 8pm, would a user subscribed to that calendar see the updated time on their personal phone (likely using Google Calendar)?

Many thanks

Leo

[Josh]

Hey Leonardo,

Thanks for reaching out here.

To clarify, it is my understanding that using the “webcal://” version of the feed will allow the secondary calendar to subscribe to the feed and that calendar will use that to request updates from the original calendar. There isn’t anything we would do on our end to push updates out to the secondary calendar, we’re only making sure the iCal format generated on the main site would have the latest versions of events from your site.

Let me know if this helps.

Thanks!

[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

[Author]

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