Tag Archives: google calendar

How to test your ical calendar events feed

The amr-events plugin offers a ical feed for any wordpress archive that generates an rss feed. (Provided of course there are events created with that categeory, tag, author etc).  Simply add ?feed=ics at the end of the url.

Note the ics feed will list ALL events that meet the archive criteria. IE: it should return both

  • the standard posts that have event data AND
  • the custom post type events if you have both configured.

Subscribing or Importing or “Adding event to Google”

Import a calendar

Import a ics file means that one imports the events as they are defined in the calendar file.  There is no syncing or updates – ie you will NOT receive any updates made to the calendar or events.  One can import a set of events into an existing calendar.

Subscribe to a calendar

Subscribing means telling the calendar application the url of the calendar.  It will then fetch the calendar at regular intervals, checking for updates.  The calendar must be available publicly, and in Google’s case, there must be a robots.txt file that allows access for the google bot.  Usually this would appear as a separate calendar in one’s calendar application, allowing one to “click” the calendar off or on (very handy).  In google’s case there is often a delay in receiving updates (sometimes > 24hours).  Add your request for improvement by upvoting this feature request to at least allow manual refresh of google calendar .

Adding a event to Google

The amr-ical-events-list plugin provides the possibility of including a “add to google” link, which will pass the event details to google calendar (if the user is logged in) and create the event in the individuals calendar.

Problems subscribing to a the amr-events feed

  • I am aware of some problems directly subscribing from google calendar. It is either VERY SLOW (as in it may take awhile before the events appear), or reports a problem with robots.txt.  Doing some searches indicates that this is not an uncommon problem when interacting with google.   Saving the ics file and importing to the Google calendar does work however.  So i guess for ease of use the “add to google” button I have may have to stay.
  • Thunderbird seems to subscribe quite happily.
  • Windows Calendar (does anyone even use that ?) is also fine.

Getting Out of Memory Messages?

I need to look into this further, I had this problem as soon as I activated the permalinks and the rewrite rules (which may or may not have had anything to do with it), but in googling answers, did find that wordpress may be a hog on memory and partially this may be due to auto loading global options.
If you are able to up your memory, add this to your wp_config.php

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);

A temporary fix may be to go to your DB and delete all the transient options.  Cached versions of feeds etc which may be getting loaded into memory.