Subscribing to a Calendar

[Bob Lennard]

I’ve gone through the Knowledgebase and searched until I’m blurry-eyed, but I can’t seem to find an complete solution to my problem.

We use the calendar for our synagogue, and the Rabbi has requested that we sync it to his Android phone calendar as well. I have found plenty of options where he can manually download a period of time to his phone using an .ics file. However, this requires manual intervention over and over and doesn’t keep the calendar in sync with updates.

I tried doing it with the RSS feed, but Google Calendar wants the .ics file instead. Plus, as best I can tell, I have to manually generate that .ics file each time in order for the end user to consume it.

Surely there is a better way, and I’m just missing it. Is there a way to have Events Calendar Pro generate an updated .ics file with the same URL regularly? I’m really just looking for a solution we can setup once for the end user. The tech folks can deal with issues, but the average user really struggles with this kind of thing as I’m sure you know.

Any advice or guidance would be appreciated greatly!

Thanks,

Bob

[Sky]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for reaching out! I’d be happy to help with your questions.

We do have an option to download the calendar for a period of time in an ics file as you have discovered, but this requires manual effort each time. There is a free extension that allows you to download a year at a time, but this still has to be done manually.

Our calendar is more geared toward pulling in events from other sources to be displayed on the website itself than as a hub for others to sync from.

We have a product called Events Aggregator that will allow you to pull in events from various calendar sources, such as Google Calendar, iCal, etc on a scheduled basis.

My recommendation would be to use something like Google Calendar as the hub, and then both the site Calendar and the Rabbi’s calendar on his phone could be pulling from the same source.

There is also a way to pull events from your website into another website directly using Aggregator, but I don’t think that is going to help in this case.

Do you need the calendar to be available offline? Would just bookmarking the site calendar in his phone not work?

Hope that helps! Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

Thanks,
Sky

[Bob Lennard]

We do own the Event Aggregator, but as of yet it hasn’t turned out to be too helpful. I get more errors than good pulls with it. (I already have another ticket open on it.)

While this doesn’t really solve my issue, it does let me know that I can quit scratching my head for a direct solution. I appreciate the follow-up.

As a suggested improvement for future versions, you guys might want to consider allowing Event Aggregator to be the “hub”. I suspect, much like ourselves, many people would prefer for this to be the true master calendar vs. another source where we have to import.

Thanks for all of your help!

Bob

[Sky]

Bob,

I’m glad I could help!

Sorry that doesn’t solve your immediate needs. Feel free to make your suggestion on our User Voice Forum. If enough people express interest in something, it may be considered as a feature in the future.

Thanks,
Sky

[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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