Update for ical subscription feed feature

[Jason]

Hi,
I’ve been following the updates around the ical subscription feature:
https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/3777092-subscribe-to-calendar-via-ical

It looked like it was going to be released soon as of Sept 2014 and the last update is from May 2015 that there were some issues with it that needed to be addressed before release. Is there any update to this and a planned release date?

I just need to decide if we need to start custom coding a feed using the api or if we should wait for this feature.

Thanks
– Jason

[Barry]

Hi Jason,

Unfortunately, work on this was postponed while we reviewed some differences in the way various apps consume the iCal data as we were reluctant to officially launch a feature that might not work as expected on one or more popular calendar apps.

I’m afraid I cannot offer any guarantees as to when this will be driven to completion and so if you need something in the short term a custom solution is likely to be the best way forward.

[Jason]

Hi Barry,
I’m not sure I agree with this at all. You already have an ical export. If you are concerned with how other systems consume ical data you should be concerned about having an ical export as well. The ical feed should be exactly the same data as the export…just provided in a live http request so that people can subscribe to the event so they get an update to it when the venue changes or the event gets cancelled, etc. Many many calendaring solutions provide this and it’s critical (as you all have heard in the comments on this feature request) for many solutions. Even our custom calendar that we’ve coded that we are trying to replace has an ical feed. If we don’t provide a live feed on one of our calendars students might be going to events that have been cancelled, rescheduled, etc.

Releasing an ical feed should not be dependent on how other systems consume it. As long as the ical feed your system generates follows the icalendar standard (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545) it’s not your problem if another system doesn’t follow the standard when consuming. And I can tell you right now that the majority of calendar systems that folks are using to consume ical feeds do support the standard (iphone, google, exchange, etc) do follow the standard.

[Barry]

Hi Jason,

Apologies for what was admittedly a poorly worded initial response. In hindsight, using a term like “consumption” was not a good choice here.

As you’ve essentially highlighted the RFC in question does not really concern itself with whether a user agent performs a one-off import or handles the data as a subscription – the iCal data itself should be the same regardless. Rather, it is concerned with accurately transporting the event data.

Even our custom calendar that we’ve coded that we are trying to replace has an ical feed.

Essentially, we do too 🙂

The iCal export link for the upcoming events list for instance supplies dynamically generated content and it is entirely possible to subscribe to this, in the sense of configuring an app to check in and update its own local copy of events based on this.

Re-purposing this to clearly present it as a feed (and even switching the scheme to webcal://) is readily possible right now with a simple customization or two and perhaps doing so could tide you over until we officially release feed support.

To sum up:

• The validity of our existing iCal output (in relation to the standard described in RFC 5545 and later) is not the problem here
• We do have concerns about the over-all user experience that have stopped us from officially releasing this feature and I am afraid I cannot provide an ETA for final delivery

[Jason]

Could you point me in the right direction as far as what customizations I would need to make in order to re-use the existing export as a live feed?

[Barry]

Sure – so our Themer’s Guide is the best starting place if you’re unfamiliar with the process of customizing our plugin, and is well worth reading if you have not already done so.

Where exactly you should make the changes is going to depend on where you want to expose links to the iCal feed (bear in mind, you could potentially “hand craft” the links and add them to pages, posts, your nav menu or via the before/after HTML fields we provide, as opposed to coding a solution).

In terms of forming links to the feed itself we do have some helper functions (or “template tags”) such as tribe_get_ical_link() that will provide you with the required URL.

You might decide to change the scheme to webcal:// with some code like this (as one means of hinting that the app should “subscribe”) before displaying it:

$feed = str_replace( 'http://', 'webcal://', tribe_get_ical_link() );
echo '<a href="' . $feed . '">Subscribe to iCal Feed</a>';

That’s a simple example, of course, but hopefully it gives you the basic idea and you can build up from there 🙂

[Jason]

Ahh, ok I see what you mean now. This is how you would add a link to the ical feed from within the interface. I understand now that I can point folks desiring a feed directly at the ical URL (?ical=1) that I want to serve up. This is exactly what I was looking for. I’m a little confused as to what the feature request is asking for now.

However, I am having a bit of trouble with google calendar consuming the feed. My ical url would be:
http://wpengineplayground.wharton.upenn.edu/events/?ical=1&tribe_display=month

MS Outlook imports this fine. Google can’t import from this URL though. If I save the ics file that’s generated and put it on a webserver then google is able to import it just fine. Have you guys run into this? Any guidance?

Thanks

[Barry]

I’m a little confused as to what the feature request is asking for now.

Well, in a sense, it’s not much more than a fairly subtle twist on something we already offer.

MS Outlook imports this fine. Google can’t import from this URL though. If I save the ics file that’s generated and put it on a webserver then google is able to import it just fine. Have you guys run into this? Any guidance?

Hmm, that’s strange.

I do have a theory, though, which is that the suggested filename is throwing Google for one reason or another.

There is a small snippet found here that reduces it to a smaller size – could you try adding this to your theme’s functions.php file or some other suitable location and see if that enables importing-buy-URL to work as expected?

function ical_export_filename( $return ) {
    header( 'Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="events.ics"' );
    return $return;
}

add_filter( 'tribe_ical_properties', 'ical_export_filename' )

Let me know if that helps!

[Jason]

Hi Barry,
No, it doesn’t seem to help. Here’s the ical feed I’m trying to add:
http://wpengineplayground.wharton.upenn.edu/events/?ical=1

This works fine in outlook but not in google calendar. I see that your wpshindigs feed at http://wpshindig.com/events/?ical=1&tribe_display=month works and does import into google calendar.

I’ve done a lot of searching. One suggestion I came across was that robots.txt was blocking it. I made my robots.txt the same as yours as wpshindig and it still doesn’t work.

Any suggestions.

Thanks

[Barry]

Hi Jason,

Some curious results there.

The feed itself appears to be valid but I see what you mean (and there is definitely a curious difference between adding it as a URL and importing a local copy manually).

Am I right in thinking this is your staging site? Is the calendar currently deployed on the live site, too, and does the same problem manifest itself with the iCal URLs provided there?

[Jason]

Hi Barry,
Sorry for the delay in responding. This is a test site that I’m playing around with in order to see if this will work for us. It is not deployed on a live site yet but this site should be the same setup as our live sites.

[Barry]

Hi Jason,

No problem about the delay.

What’s strange is we aren’t seeing widespread reports along these lines and we can also see live examples of feeds that do import as expected into Google Calendar (such as our demo site, WP Shindig). What’s also odd is if I capture your feed in a file and make it accessible via a test server, Google imports it as expected.

Why exactly there is this difference, I’m not sure (line endings follow the normal pattern, etc) – but in the absence of any obvious indicators running through our standard troubleshooting steps is worth a shot here – it’s possible some other component is interfering in some subtle way.

Could you give that a go?

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