I know you’re waiting to hear back from Stephen on this one, but just wanted to chip in…
As far as I know, EO already has a real-time ICS feed for the whole calendar. I don’t think the feed supports categories though. Stephen said he’d try and implement this in v1.5, so I would be grateful for an update- here is the original thread-
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-event-organiser-different-ical-feeds-for-each-category
Securing an ICS feed by password is a fairly advanced request but I can see why it would be useful. How were you thinking this could be implemented? How would the password be entered? Would this be via HTTP?
I like the idea of importing an ICS feed as well as this happening via WP-CRON. This would enable the synching of another calendar such as Google Calendar. I’m pretty sure this would not be an easy job to implement though. Having said that it might make adding events to EO a lot easier for some of my less tech savvy clients.
Hi guys,
Category specific feeds
EO supports ics feeds for individual venues, categories and tags. Just append /feed/eo-events to the end of the venue/category/tag url.
(@baritoneuk – sorry I didn’t update you on that thread!)
Of course that only works for a specific category not multiple categories.
Importing feeds
This is related to this thread. As far as the ‘core’ plug-in is concerned, all that needs to be developed is a proper API with filters/actions where appropriate (I’ll hopefully get this into 2.1).
The rest could be done as an add-on to Event Organiser.
Every event should have a globally unique identifier – which could be stored in post meta to prevent duplicate events. (as baritoneuk pointed out in the thread linked to above).
Then a simple cron WP-Cron job could check, and import calendars from the feed.
Event Organiser only produces a globally unique identifier for created events when exporting an event – and doesn’t save it. I’ll change this for 2.1.
Specifying import category/status
I’ll keep this in mind when developing the API referred to above…
Ability to secure the ICS feeds by password or just IP address.
The ICS feeds don’t show anything that a user can’t see by visiting the site. What’s the use case here? I suppose its possible, via public key encryption, to validate a request without revealing a ‘password’.
Cross-site sharing
This is difficult – WP multisite wasn’t built for it, and using the ICS feeds necessarily means ‘loosing’ data (e.g. custom fields, venue details (except name)) cannot be included in ICS files.
Stephen, no worries about not updating original thread- you can’t keep track of everything! It is great that you support categories now- brilliant. Just wondering is there a way of changing the “eo-events” bit in the url to something else? It’s just me being a control freak and wanting my URLs to be as semantic as possible!
I’d love there to be a syncing function in EO as an addon. It’s a bit beyond me to create it so I am going to wait for someone talented (Stephen?) to do it!
Just update (cross posting, I know):
2.1 comes with a parser you can use. Still more to be done, see https://github.com/stephenharris/Event-Organiser/issues/91.
And for the parser: https://github.com/stephenharris/Event-Organiser/commit/5ba80109c00582c5dc0dbec9e6e597d54b4eafb6 (it can import from an url too).
@baritoneuk will maybe make that (feed url) option available in 2.2…
Great news, thanks Stephen!
Glad to see the updates and addon.
The only problem now is that I have ICS feeds that have no embedded category info or the wrong info and I have to manually move them into the correct category. If I could specify a category for an imported feed, that would make life easier.
