Parsing Event Data for Mobile / Web Application

[Michelle]

My developer want to know if there is a way to parse event data via RSS or other feed type via Events Calendar Pro that will allow him to populate events in a mobile/web application. I’m trying to solve my calendar display issues (discussed previously on the forum http://nwkidsmagazine.com/events/month/), and this could be a great solution. We’d want the event details (title, location, address, date, description) in the data. Is this possible? Can you give me any information I can pass on?

Thank you!

Michelle

[Joyce Grace]

Hello Michelle, I think the best thing to do would be to show your developer our technical documentation page: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/documentation

We also have a tutorial on how to add events to the RSS feed that may be useful: https://theeventscalendar.com/how-to-add-events-to-your-rss-feed/

Let me know if this helps!

[Michelle]

Joyce,

We’d love to use the RSS feed, but apparently it doesn’t populate the necessary data – particularly the date of the event and event details. If you know of a workaround with this, let us know. Using the RSS feed would be our first choice for sure!!!

We’ve looked over your support docs, and it all seems to refer to using the Calendar within the WordPress shell. We are trying to access the data remotely.

Our second option seems to be to use the WordPress Plugin ‘JSON API’ to retrieve the data. We need to know how to call all future events & the future events by event category.

If we can’t to the RSS feed, we need one of two things:

Are the events are given any particular ‘tag’ ‘slug’ or ‘category’ within the WP posts.
OR, is there a way to call all future events on a page (rather than a single day)?

Thanks!

[Michelle]

I was able to get a page listing all the events for the upcoming 90 days:
http://nwkidsmagazine.com/meventsall/

Now, unfortunately, I’m having trouble calling the events as posts from that url using JASON API. Is isn’t seeing them as posts. Thoughts? Is there another way to call the events? Slug? Category? Post type?

If I could only export this data as an RSS feed… ugh…

[Michelle]

And, btw, my events don’t show up at http://nwkidsmagazine.com/events/feed
I don’t want to add my events to the my post feed. Per your documentation, ‘The Events Calendar does provide it’s own RSS feed which can be found at http://your-url.com/your-events-slug/feed.’ Thoughts?

[Joyce Grace]

Hello Michelle,

I think you need an API and we haven’t released that yet, but it is coming soon.

In the mean time, you may want to look at this page: https://theeventscalendar.com/wordpress-events-calendar/features/customization/ (probably won’t be A LOT of help…but worth a go)

And our Settings API https://theeventscalendar.com/tribe-settings-api/

I can tell you the calendar uses custom post types – but that should be obvious if you are opening up the files in the plugin folder.

Beyond that this is really a customization issue which we don’t normally support. If someone is available with the skill level to help you out I will try to get them on here to see what they can do, but no promises – very sorry about that.

Do let us know how you make though, because I’m sure the community will benefit from your findings.

[moderntribe]

Hi, Michelle;

The functions you’ll probably want to look at most are the template tags that we have set up for retrieving event data. They can be found in the public/template-tags/ directory within the plugin. Let me know if examining those files will give you some functions so that you can create the functionality you require for developing your web service.

Thanks for using The Events Calendar!

[Joyce Grace]

Hello Michelle,
I’m just following up on this, since it’s been over a week and we need to close out the issue. Did Paul’s solution work for you?

Do let us know!

Thanks!

[Michelle]

Not really. The template tags are for use within the WordPress site. I’m trying to parse the events into a native app. I can get the events from ‘today’ using the ‘myurl.com/events/feed’ but:
1. The events are sorted by date published, not date of the event
2. I can’t get select a particular day or even the month
3. A lot of the details are missing (image/address/time)
4. I don’t want to change the entire RSS actions of the website – just want to get the feed of my events selectable by day and show the details

[Michelle]

I can retreive data by day by entering nwkidsmagazine.com/events/date

i.e. http://nwkidsmagazine.com/events/2012-09-01

If I could translate that into an rss feed I’d be dialed… (and if it listed the event dates rather than post dates)

[Joyce Grace]

Hello Michelle, this may be a customization issue which we can’t really support but I am going to see if Paul can chime in, no guarantees though 🙁

[Joyce Grace]

Hello Michelle, I had notice from Paul that this is really beyond our scope at the moment. There might be a fix for the 2.1 lifecycle, though I can’t say when.

Basically RSS feeds aren’t meant to behave in the style you are looking for – it seems you are requesting full event RSS feeds, which we’ve had a lot of requests for and have logged as an issue, but nothing has yet been deployed along those lines. As it stands now we have basic RSS feeds that work like they would on a regular blog (ie appearing by date of publication rather than date of event). You’ll need to build something on your own or find a third-party plugin that can do this if you needs it before we have something ready to go. Sorry!

[Joyce Grace]

By the way Michelle if you are able to build something I’m sure the community here would love to hear about it and what you did to get it working, so do please share!

[Barry]

Not really. The template tags are for use within the WordPress site.

Just a thought Michelle, but although the template tags are generally used within theme templates they don’t have to be used in this way. You could definitely use them elsewhere simply as a means of pulling data into the views for your custom feed.

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