Event feeds can be
- RSS feeds – they are in date entered order, only the “newest” events and can be read in a feed reader
- Ics feeds – they contain ALL the events (or at least all those queried), and can be subscribed to by calendar programs or imported
Rss Feeds
Events will appear in a
- standard rss feed if they are standard posts (not custom post types) – they will be “mixed in” with your normal posts. Users need only subscribe to one url.
- events only standard rss feed with a post type parameter request (that will list only the events) : http://yoursite.com/feed/?post_type=event
Ics or Ical feeds
The main ics feed is http://yoursite.com/?feed=ics. You can choose to display this link or not in the Calendar properties for each list type.
Any wordpress archive(eg: by author, by taxonomy) that generates an rss feed, can also be used to generate a ical feed with the amr-events plugin. Simply add ?feed=ics at the end of the url. One important difference to note is that 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). This is so you can transition gracefully from using one to using another or perhaps you have a reason for wanting some to be like normal posts and some to be custom.
Category Archive Examples (with standard posts):
- category archive: http://….?cat=3&feed=ics
Author Archives
- Admin created events: http://….?author=1&feed=ics
Individual Event Feed
One can even have individual event ics feeds, allowing one to offer subscription to a single repeating event.
- Christmas in July: http://….?post_type=event&p=7&feed=ics
Date Archives
Note that that wp date archives sort by the date stamp – the date and time that they were created. For events a better date based archive is really the calendar list and of course the feed is the ics feed.
Subscribing to an ics feed with Calendar Software
The ics feed has been tested on a variety of calendar programs- the most finicky of which was google, but even tat is happy now.
For many ical sources) (not just this plugin) I am aware of a problem directly subscribing from google calendar. It is either VERY SLOW, or reports a problem with robots.txt. I gave it a robots.txt for my test site and it doesn’t complain now when “subscribing” but events are slow to show up.). Doing some searches indicates that this is not an uncommon problem when interacting with google calendar.
Importing an ics file 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.
Note:
- importing is a one off action, the calendar usually does not poll for updates
- subscribing is a regular action – the calendar application will check for new events and updates to events (using the SEQUENCE number in the ics file to detect whether an update has occured).
Google Calendar and external ics urls
- Feature request to at least option to manually refresh an external url (add your vote please)
- Visibility of google calendar external url refresh update status would be good too – lots of puzzled folks