Back compatible – Updated iCal for WP Calendar

After some more time and nearly 2500 downloads the new version of iCal for WP Calendar is available.
After WP Calendar author has changed the database scheme in the new version 1.5, it took me ages, to find time for this update. Still seeing, that also the – now outdated – version of iCal for WP Calendar is downloaded continuously, I decided to keep it backward compatible.

So, the new version works fine with WP Calendar 1.5.x and also all previous versions.

New features are:

• added compatibilty for WP Calendar 1.5.x
• link of ical feed is printed in the options page

Updated iCal for WP Calendar

After some time and nearly 500 downloads the new version of iCal for WP Calendar is available.
Although I really like git, the repository on github.com will no longer be maintained – wordpress offers the SVN so I use it.

New features are:

• proven to work work newest wordpress version 3.3.1
• added check and notification, if WP Calendar is not activated
• added query parameter ‚category‘ to limit events in the feed

iCal for WP Calendar

Presenting:

An extension for the WordPress plugin WP Calendar, which generates iCal / RFC5545 / RFC2445 conform files to be imported in several Calendar applications like Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar.

This is my first WordPress plugin, so I researched several existing plugins like iCal for Events Calendar and Event Calendar 3. As Event Calendar 3 is outdated and I didn’t like the mixup of events and posts, as it’s done in ec3, I switched to WP Calendar, after a long research in event/calendar plugins for WordPress. Althoug the iCal support was a mandatory feature for me, I choosed WP Calendar and promissed to me, to write the iCal extension on my own – so here we are.

Features

• generate valid iCal file with events from WP Calendar, incl. location, URL to a connected post (if available) and allDay events
• admin page for the number of past months to include
• debug flag for easy debugging of the resulting iCal file in the browser itself (file can also be validated using http://icalvalid.cloudapp.net/)

The Plugin was developed under WordPress 3.1.2 and WP Calendar 1.4.3 but will also work with older version of both.

Installation

1. Unzip in your plugins directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‚Plugins‘ menu in WordPress.
3. add the link to your template or use following code to generate the URL:

   echo ical_wp_calendar_getIcalUrl();

Download

Until the plugin is submitted to the WordPress.com plugin browser you can download it at github.com:

https://github.com/barclay-reg/ical-for-wp-calendar/

Roadmap

• add check, if WP Calendar is installed
• add warning to settings menu, of WP Calendar is not installed
• add option, to choose the datemode, when queried the events
• add option, to choose the category / or add this as parameter
• add option, to choose the time method in iCal: UTC (default now), floating or th timezome, which is specified in wordpress itself

So come and try this plugin, leave me a comment or submit an issue at github.com, if there is a problem.

Cheers,
Barclay