Author Topic: integration with iCal and/or Google Calendar - private calendars? (Read 4054 times)

battez · July 31, 2008, 04:56:31 am

Hi,

I am looking around the impressive documentation and support for CiviCrm, as to understand if it would be a good fit for my organisation.

We use Google Calendar for our scheduling of - the team has Google accounts and each is a member of an organisational calendar, which is private .

If we were to post events from CiviCrm (CiviEvent - I assume?) and would it be able to integrate well with our Google Calendar? Also would our Google Calendar export back to CiviCRM OK?
(I relasie that is maybe more a aspect of Google but still, maybe someone here has done these things?)

thank you in advance for any advice or assistance you may be able to give.

Luke,

and greetings from Scotland!

geilhufe · July 31, 2008, 09:27:59 am

I did a tutorial on this, but can't find it now

So the basic outlines:

(1) CiviCRM publishes a ical feed for CiviEvents. Something like this:
http://servername.domain/civicrm/event/ical?reset=1&page=1
(2) Create a new Google Calendar with that feed as the data source.
Now you have a google calendar "window" on CiviEvents.

It does not work in the reverse direction since CiviEvent is about tracking registrations and lots of info about events that google does not provide.

DaraghOBrien · July 31, 2008, 10:29:52 am

one word of caution... the CiviEvent ical feed doesn't seem to play nice with the latest release of Drupal Calendar and the Date API. The latest release-candidate of Calendar creates the event as a node in its own right (you have to define a content type for it as the new Calendar view requires a date field to be defined). The ical import is now done using a date import/export utility, which doesn't seem to like the civicrm ical url. Unfortunately the new Date Api release candidate doesn't work with the old calendar module.

Versions of Date API and Calendar I am referring to are the Date 5.2.x-RC4 and Calendar 5.2.x-RC3. Intregrating CiviEvent with drupal calendar requires the 5.1.x versions of both of these modules (and is a doddle to set up once you take your time and remember to set the correct permissions in Drupal to access civievent).

It's a pity, as the new date api in drupal makes things a lot more 'human' friendly and extends some new functionality capabilities.

Oh yeah... I'm running drupal5.7 at the moment so if you are on 6.x this might not matter.

Donald Lobo · July 31, 2008, 11:08:45 am

Daragh:

Can you help figure out what changes are needed in CiviCRM iCal output so it can be imported by the 5.2.x versions of Drupal

As far as we know, we've attempted to follow the appropriate specs and generate the iCal feed based on the specs. We've also imported them in Google Calendar / Apple iCal quite successfully. Is this a limitation with Drupal Date 5.2.x or incorrect behavior with the CiviCRM iCal output?

If you can investigate and come back with recommendations / suggestions that would help us and the community a whole lot

lobo

battez · August 06, 2008, 08:03:36 am

Hi all, thank you for your helpful responses.

It sounds pretty cool, I can imagine that will be very useful, think I will try a demo install and see how I get on. the only reason I mention the in reverse calendaring *from* Google to Civi-events, is that I can see that when we are out and about and want to adjust our calendar for a contact, I am not sure we could edit CiviCRM on our mobiles. (but we can do this with google calendar). I wil test out logging in to CiviCRm from a mobile and see at some point.

(if we were able to post a simple event to Google calendar and have that pciked up by CiviCrm you see, it would be invaluable)

DaraghOBrien · August 06, 2008, 08:31:33 am

Lobo,

The issue with the new Date API/Calendar module that I have experienced is that the new Calendar module requires a Drupal node-type to be created into which your events are imported. The iCal import from CiviEvent works OK, however trying to link back from the Calendar instance to the event registration page doesn't work - I am assuming the field needs to be brought into the calendar/event content type but I haven't had a chance to figure out how, and as I'm coming under time pressure to complete build and test cycles on my project I'm going for the low risk path of sticking with the 'older' versions of these modules where the integration path is well documented and proven.

The integration issue isn't between ical and calendar or civicrm but with the way the civievent data is created in the calendar content type . There doesn't seem to be an option to do the type of integration that occurs in the older version of 'calendar'. Which is a pity as the new Date API resolves a number of issues about the presentation and management of timezones which are important for an international organisation.

Once I get this build out of the way I'll return to this as part of my planning for future upgrade roadmaps (e.g.drupal 6, civi2.1 etc.) and figure out the solution. I'll also raise an issue on the Date and Calendar module project pages to see what they suggest.

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Author Topic: integration with iCal and/or Google Calendar - private calendars? (Read 4054 times)

battez

integration with iCal and/or Google Calendar - private calendars?

geilhufe

Re: integration with iCal and/or Google Calendar - private calendars?

DaraghOBrien

Re: integration with iCal and/or Google Calendar - private calendars?

Donald Lobo

Re: integration with iCal and/or Google Calendar - private calendars?

battez

Re: integration with iCal and/or Google Calendar - private calendars?

DaraghOBrien

Re: integration with iCal and/or Google Calendar - private calendars?