Tag Archives: categories

Categories from ics files

An ics file may have ‘CATEGORIES’ in it.  For formatting purposes, the plugin treats these  similar to the wordpress ‘Category’, and will ‘mimic’ the links that are generated by wordpress categories.

Unlike wordpress event category or taxonomy based selection, selection of ics events via shortcode parameter is not currently offered.  It is preferable (more efficient) to do your selection of events for your ics file page by selecting the events for your ics file at the providing system side.  Hopefully the providing system offers the necessary parameters, as the amr-events plugin does when it offers ics feeds.

A tailored ics feed reduces the size of the file and the number of events that have to be parsed unneccesarily by this plugin.  Those ics files can get big over time, so if you have the option to select only current and future events, do that too!

For example of tailored ics feeds, see the demo site for amr-events – one can see that multiple selections are available from the amr-events to tailor an ics feed.

Example ICS Extract:

DTEND:20170429T010000Z
CATEGORIES:New Technology,User Experience,Web Technology,Web Development,Computer programming,Software Development,Technology,Interaction Design,Internet Startups,Web Design,iOS Development,Graphic Design,Ruby On Rails,Python
DTSTART:20170428T150000Z

The plugin will try to pretend that these are like wordpress categories, and will create ‘links’ behind the ics category names.   To demonstrate, use the default list type with your ics file. The CATEGORIES should appear below the description:

Example formatting of ics categories:

One can click on the links generated to see just the events with that ics CATEGORY.

Note that the whole file still has to be parsed before event selection can take place.