I’m working on integrating a Google Calendar into a WP blog (not this one, an NMC project in development). The master plan is to allow a number of groups ti enter potential shared events into a common calendar, and syndicate to our blog site.
I have a few events dumped into a Google Calendar for testing. What I’ve tried include:
* wooglecal plugin – it’s easy to set up and use, but there is no control over the formatting/display of content- and it automatically skips past events. It would need some moderate tinkering to set up options for which calendar items are displayed (e.g. a reduced list for a side bar). Temporary demo is here.
* gCal plugin – has a nicer WP interface, but I could not get it do see more than one past events
* AJAX Google Calendar Events – works well for a sidebar display (tweaking needed to get a link to the event rather than the XML). Needs some JavaScript trickery, not yet done, to better format date/times. Would need even more to somehow separate past and future events. A test site is at http://www.nmc.org/sl/cal/.
I’ve not done nearly enough coding in any of these to make decent headway. The plugins are raw, just a notch above hacks. And from what I can see, the Google Calendar RSS structure is rather hairy, not your run of the mill set of tags. In fact, providing a direct link to a public Google Calendar has been elusive (or it was a few weeks again when I first played with it).
Back to the lab for more tinkering….
Hey Alan,
Am glad you are on the case with this. I hope that something gets developed over the next few months so I can fully utilize gcal at my school. Can see setting up all kinds of calendars for everything from the computer lab schedule, to reserving classrooms and equipment. Having simple RSS type fees would be great so we could utilize your great tool… Feed2JS to automatically display calendar data on staff and school web pages…
Thanks,
Tim
Are you committed to google calendar? I’m quite fond (crazy, really) about 30boxes. Technically it doesn’t offer group calendars, but you can create a calendar with one password and add multiple email addys to it. I love the post-by-email and new to-do list features.
Author of the WoogleCal plugin speaking. Just to be clear: I designed this plugin after my own needs. Further customization should be done in the code I’m afraid. I’m updating my blog soon, so perhaps I’ll release a second version, who knows.
And skipping past events is a feature. No need for old events to be in an agenda like this 🙂
Thanks for jumping in Robert- I did not mean to sound un-appreciative of the code you freely shared (and it does work great)– it was my intent to return and try to tinker with it to add some options.
The feed format is just so darn freaky, and I only hope there is a Good Reason.