Feature #4524: Create a iCal Feed for Events Calendar - CUNY Academic Commons - CUNY Graduate Center - Project Tracking System

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Feature #4524

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Create a iCal Feed for Events Calendar

Added by scott voth about 9 years ago. Updated almost 9 years ago.

Status:

Resolved

Priority name:

Normal

Assignee:

Raymond Hoh

Category name:

Events

Target version:

1.9

Start date:

2015-08-29

Due date:

% Done:

Estimated time:

Deployment actions:

Description

Member Raffi Khatchadourian wonders if we can add new functionality that would enable events to "feed into" external calendar clients instead of the manual export/import scenario we have now.
This is somewhat related to https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/4423

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subscribe.png (5.8 KB) subscribe.png		Raymond Hoh, 2015-10-20 12:39 PM
manage-icalendar-url.png (17 KB) manage-icalendar-url.png		Raymond Hoh, 2015-10-20 12:39 PM

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Updated by Boone Gorges about 9 years ago

Assignee set to Raymond Hoh
Target version set to Future release

Ray, I know we've talked about this in the past, but I can't remember where. Pinging you for your thoughts.

It looks as if EO offers the shortcode 'eo_subscribe' for its native calendars. The calendar links themselves are basically generated by `get_feed_link()` or `get_term_feed_link()`. We could do something similarly simple, though the feed URL would be funny. Alternatively, we could build our own feed handler, and serve our own feed, at a more predictable URL, like example.com/groups/mygroup/events/feed/.

The second potential complication is privacy. Events linked to private groups are themselves private. Since feed requests would not be authenticated, they wouldn't include any private events. And BP will natively try to prevent unauthenticated requests to any URL under a private group, including /events/feed, which will make it impossible for anyone to subscribe to a non-public group's feed. We could probably build a system of private keys or something like that (the URL would be /events/feed/?key=abc123) but this is a pretty flimsy layer of privacy.

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Updated by Raymond Hoh about 9 years ago

We could probably build a system of private keys or something like that (the URL would be /events/feed/?key=abc123) but this is a pretty flimsy layer of privacy.

I do not think this is flimsy, Google Calendar operates in a similar manner with public and private iCal links.

Public - https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/EMAIL/public/basic.ics (shows only public events for the user)
Private - https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/EMAIL/private-HASH/basic.ics (shows all events for the user)

Maybe we can go with:

example.com/groups/mygroup/events/HASH/ical/ or example.com/groups/mygroup/events/ical/HASH for private iCal feeds. Similar to Google, we'd need an interface for group admins to reset the private iCal hash.

For users, we'd need to do something similar.

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Updated by Boone Gorges about 9 years ago

Heh. If it's good enough for Google, it's good enough for me. /events/HASH/ical/ seems good to me.

I suppose the concept of a private feed is not relevant for EO itself, is it? If there were a way to build this as a PR, I'd prefer it.

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Updated by Boone Gorges about 9 years ago

Target version changed from Future release to 1.9

See #4730, which will probably be built the same way.

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Updated by Raymond Hoh about 9 years ago

Okay, so a first pass of this is ready for testing on cdev.

At the bottom of a user or group events calendar, you will now see a "Subscribe" block.

On a user's calendar page, you will see two iCalendar links: Public and Private.

Private iCalendar links are special as they look like this:
example.com/members/USER/events/SOME-HASH/ical/

Private iCalendar links consist of both public and private events that the user has posted. Members are also able to reset the hash just in case they want to change the private link for privacy reasons. This can be done on a user's "Events > Manage" page.

On a group's calendar page, you will only see one iCalendar link. If the group is private or hidden, there is an extra "Events > Manage" tab so the group admin can reset the private iCalendar URL.

Let me know what you think once you've had a chance to test.

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