REQUEST: ics format shortcode

Interesting idea. How do you see it working? Would it be an extension of the current [event_embed] shortcode?

[event_embed limit="200" output="ical-button"]

Something like the above?

The reason I’m thinking of extending an existing shortcode is that people then have the option of using it’s existing capabilities to target a specific set of events (by date, category or whatever).

Not sure exactly what limit is doing

It just limits the number of events – otherwise on sites with large numbers of events there is a risk that when the feed is generated the site would “crash”.

also [… output=”ical-url” …] would add flexibility.

Good call, it may simply be better than a button and site admins can use it how they will.

Hi!

Should I infer that without the limit argument, the default number of events per page is used?

Yes: I probably should make this clearer in the docs, but I want users to be explicit about how many posts should potentially be returned, since on sites with a large number of events this has potential to cause problems if left unchecked.

Is there anything which can be done about the filename?

Possibly, but can you clarify what you feel needs to be done?

That’s a good observation and something I failed to catch (or may not have been a problem when I first wrote that piece of code).

What Event Rocket actually tries to do is set the filename to something like this:

20150910114819-4b3403665fea6.ics

Not designed for its aesthetic charm, but it comprises two sections – the first representing the date/time of the request and the second being near-unique – and is of a fixed length.

However, as with most things in Event Rocket, iCal generation fundamentally relies on The Events Calendar to do a lot of the legwork and, in this case, The Events Calendar is overwriting the suggested filename provided (like the one above) with its own.

Unfortunately, there’s not currently a way around this unless I have Event Rocket take over the entire iCal generation process (and I’m not going to do that).

It does seem like a legitimate concern, though, since an exported list view or month view could also conceivably contain a large number of events and suffer the same problem – so I’ll be sure to log a bug on the tracker for The Events Calendar itself since it does seem silly to increase the filename in this manner without any checks.

I tell a lie – it might be possible to fix this up with a little hack. Let’s say you consistently want the filename to be ‘events.ics’:

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

add_filter( 'tribe_ical_properties', 'ical_export_filename' )

That should do the trick … but please note it is completely untested. (When I get a chance I’ll test and roll it into Event Rocket if it works.)