Hey folks! Back again with a bit of a brain teaser for you. I’m setting up a website for a local literary nonprofit and we’d like a web page that will display our own upcoming events, as well as other lit events around the city. So for example, I’d ideally have one calendar that would display events for the following three venues: https://www.ebookwoman.com/event http://austinslam.com/events/
All our local venues have FB pages, so grabbing data from their Events feeds is one option (though I’d prefer to redirect folks to the individual venue websites, rather than feed the FB beast).
I could create and display calendar for just our events, and then maybe embed an events widget below that for each additional venue we’d like to promote (perhaps, again, using FB events. I’d say RSS feeds but not everybody in town uses those). Lastly, I could manually add all of the events to a Google calendar we maintain and display that with a simple plugin, but I don’t think that’s feasible or scalable.
Any thoughts on an elegant way to pull this off or plugins I should consider? Thank you!!!
Google Calendar is going to be easiest for this, in part because 2 of the three examples you give are already using it. The key being you need something that allows you to export and import the data easily (just publishing events to a page for example won’t allow you to easily do that). So I would start with a new Google Calendar and call it whatever you want, it will be your unified events calendar. Then for each calendar you’ll see a few options, like for Malvern Books there’s this XML download:
which you can then import to your unified calendar. Similarly the poetry slam calendar has a public iCal address at https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/fcl93c86u67m0c2iindsb87qls%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics which will download an .ics file which can be imported into Google Calendar (to the same unified calendar, now you have two calendars worth of stuff in one). Embedding a Google Calendar is pretty easy, there are embed codes, plugins, etc. The only hiccup I see is https://www.ebookwoman.com/event because it looks like they’re using their own thing and not Google Calendar and I don’t see any export options, but might be worth reaching out to them to ask!
Along those same lines Timely All-in-One Events Calendar – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org is a popular plugin for building out an event calendar and some of the features they mention are adding feeds from a variety of sources including ICS/ICAL files and URLs as well as Facebook
I don’t have any experience with it but perhaps worth playing with to see if it’s what would do the job here.
Really can’t thank you enough!