CUNY Academic Commons

Duplicate of #5226?

I was just looking at the purchase price for the individual iCal sync plugin for Event Organiser and it is £10 pounds for one site license (our multisite instance counts as one site):
https://wp-event-organiser.com/extensions/event-organiser-ical-sync/

Whereas an all-encompassing developer or pro license, which includes the iCal sync plugin, ranges from £90-120 pounds:
https://wp-event-organiser.com/pricing/

Just listing all the pricing options. I think we could just go for the individual plugin and then I can build out the frontend functionality.

I'm ready to make a purchase whenever you tell me what is needed.

The question of how to subscribe TO a calendar feed came up yesterday in a digital fellows meeting. This would not help that, right -- it would just allow one to pull events in to a calendar from an external source

I'm ready to make a purchase whenever you tell me what is needed.

I think we can just go with the £10 pound purchase, located at the bottom of this page:
https://wp-event-organiser.com/extensions/event-organiser-ical-sync/

Matt, can you forward or attach a copy of that plugin to me when you've made the purchase? Thanks!

The question of how to subscribe TO a calendar feed came up yesterday in a digital fellows meeting

If you're talking about subscribing to a group or personal calendar, use the Subscribe link located at the bottom of the events calendar. You should be able to use that URL to subscribe using your calendar application of choice.

This was introduced in #4524. See https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/4524#note-6 for an example.

I tested this briefly in Thunderbird with the Lightning addon and it worked.

Whoa. So if one uses the ICS to add a Commons calendar to, say, a google calendar, the Google calendar will be updated as new events are added to the Commons calendar? That's fantastic if so!!!

Matt Gold wrote:

Whoa. So if one uses the ICS to add a Commons calendar to, say, a google calendar, the Google calendar will be updated as new events are added to the Commons calendar? That's fantastic if so!!!

In theory, that should work. I haven't really tested this in-depth, so if you encounter any bugs, let me know. Things like synchronizing added/deleted events for a specific calendar would be good to test.

Amazing work, Ray! I love the way you've borrowed from the existing plugins but made thoughtful mods to work within the Commons context.

- Deleting an iCalendar feed does not delete the previous imported events from that feed. Do we want to delete these events when deleting an iCalendar feed?

I'd say no. We definitely would not want to link feed deletion with event deletion without providing an opt-out mechanism - this would leave users without a way to unsubscribe while keeping older events from the calendar. In some perfect world we might want an interstitial "Do you also want to delete existing events imported from this feed?", but IMO this is not a dealbreaker and is probably not worth the lift at the moment. It's always possible to manually delete unwanted entries.

- In the original implementation (see first screenshot), the "Assign events to" field shows all users from a site.

I'd say remove. In 99% of cases it will be intended behavior to attribute (a better word than "assign" IMO - "assign" suggests it's a task) to the user performing the import. Actually, in 99% of cases I bet no one will notice who the "author" is anyway :) In any case, in the remaining 1% of cases, this can be changed after the fact on a per-event basis with the 'Organizer' dropdown when editing an event. (Side note: the 'Organizer' dropdown appears to contain usernames that it shouldn't. It's probably pulling from the entire site, rather than group membership.)

- In the original implementation (see first screenshot), the "Event Status" field allows the admin to set the status of the event.

IMO it's not needed. We explicitly decided when first building group calendars that we'd inherit event visibility from the group, disallowing public events in private groups. I think we can continue that for imported items.

(Side note: Boone, I noticed that group pages on the dev site are loading unusually slow, around 10 seconds and more. Could use your help in debugging.)

I'm seeing similar performance but it's pretty inconsistent. Much of the time is TTFB which suggests it's a network problem that we probably can't fix ourselves. I'll keep poking around.

In some perfect world we might want an interstitial "Do you also want to delete existing events imported from this feed?", but IMO this is not a dealbreaker and is probably not worth the lift at the moment. It's always possible to manually delete unwanted entries.

I was thinking about something similar, or maybe adding a "Delete events" link next to the existing "Edit / Delete / Fetch Now" inline links. Based on Laurie's feedback, this looks like something I should look into. I'll see what I can do.

First, I cannot see or do not know where to find the screen that is shown in the "screenshot of the import features that the Event Organiser plugin"

Hi Laurie, this was just to reference what the Event Organiser plugin does and how I was going to use those existing tools for the group's "Manage > Events" page. So you're correct that this admin page can only be accessed by a site administrator.

When I go to use the Manage>Events I cannot get the feed and ics file to relate to one another. By this I mean that when create a feed there is a random "source URL" that becomes associated with it that pulls nothing.

Sorry for not making this clear, but the iCalendar feed import and the ICS file import are two separate features. I just bundled them together in this ticket since work on both features were concurrent.

An iCalendar feed is a URL to an existing iCalendar on the internet. In my screenshot, you can see that my "Canadian Holidays" feed is a link to an iCalendar - https://www.calendarlabs.com/ical-calendar/ics/39/Canada_Holidays.ics. It must be a link to an iCalendar file and not a link that displays events.

iCalendar feeds can be synced to automatically fetch event updates, while an ICS import is a one-time import.

Based on your screenshot, it looks like the Event Organiser plugin does not validate the iCalendar feed's source when you add an invalid link. Looks like I'll have to modify the Event Organiser iCal Sync plugin to fix this.

Or, if I upload an ics file it works and pulls my iCal events into the group calendar but there no feed asdsociated with it and there is no difference in color between ical and group events, and there is no way to view just the events from the ical file since it was never associated with a feed.

Something I forgot to mention is when you upload an ICS file, it does not get a different background color like an iCalendar feed feature.

The reason here is two people can upload an ICS file with the same filename and both could be totally different. One way to figure out if an ICS file is unique is by creating a hash, then I could target that specific ICS file. If others are interested in having a different background color and a filter link for ICS file imports, let me know and I'll look into it.

Following up on today's meeting: I think we'd like to squeeze in some text/inline-doc changes before we ship this for 1.16.

Ray, I started working on a patch, but I realize now that you're calling the display_feeds() method from the EO plugin, to avoid unnecessary duplication. I wonder if we may simply have to reproduce this method in our own plugin in order to do the necessary modification. Do you think this is a reasonable approach, or should we try doing more gettext juggling?

I'd like to suggest the following changes, which I think will help to clarify the difference between subscribing to a feed URL and performing a one-time .ics import.

1. The page should have two sections (h3): 'Subscribed Calendars' and 'Event Import'.
2. Under 'Subscribed Calendars' appears (a) the feed list table (probably don't need a subheading to explain this, but if others disagree, it could be an h4 "Manage feeds" or something like that), followed by (b) an h4 'Add New Feed' and the add-new-feed form
3. Under the 'Add New Feed' h4 we add an explanatory paragraph along the lines of: "Subscribe to an external calendar by entering the URL of its iCalendar (iCal) feed. Recent events from that calendar will be imported to your group calendar. New events in the feed will be automatically imported every 60 minutes."
4. Remove/hide the sync section, and hardcode it to 60 minutes. I don't see the benefit of allowing users to change this.
5. In addition to the h3/h4 header changes, which should clearly split the page into its two separate parts, maybe add a horizontal rule or something above 'Event Import'
6. Change the text under the 'Event Import' header to something like 'Perform a one-time import of one or more events into your group's calendar. Select an .ics file to get started.'.

Ray, do you think it's doable to make these kinds of changes? Do others agree with the general suggestions?

Ray, these minor changes are hugely beneficial in terms of usability. Thanks so much for tackling them so quickly.

We're right at the point where we should be stopping feature development in order to begin team testing for 1.16 in earnest. I wonder if we might draw a line between the remaining items on your to-do list that can be done very soon - let's say, by the end of the day tomorrow (Tuesday)? - and then opening tickets to handle the other improvements for a future release.

- Remove "Sync Schedule" and automate cronjobs for groups to 60 minutes. I'll add the blurb under the "Add New Feed" heading once I've automated the group cronjobs.
- Add "Imported from" field on a single event page for ICS file imports, as well as the ability to view the calendar by ICS file import.

These two items are done.

Depending on if I have some time today, I'll see if I can get to the last two.