Calendar events from external RSS

[sere]

I would implement such a plugin if available, and maybe more people would be interested in the same idea:

would it be possible to allow mods (or even users) to specify external RSS feeds so that these would show up as "events" in their own calendars? i am thinking about, for example, news sites first of all or blogs.

anyone willing to go on this path?

[silurius]

Do you mean having your calendar get populated with events fed by calendars on other sites? I'm having trouble visualizing exactly what you mean, but the idea of RSS'ing the calendar is very compelling to me.

[sere]

Not necessarily (only) calendars from other sites. For example the calendar could hold items from a news website (like bbc.co.uk for example) with every news item appearing for the specific day in the vbulletin calendar. the same would go for sites with events, which would go into the vb callendar on their specific days. it would be a nice way to get everything centralized in the calendar for the benefit of the users and also of the webmasters.

[silurius]

I see what you are saying. That seems cool, but I think a meta calendar is even cooler, albeit challenging.

[Benj]

i would also like to feed external rss feed events into my forums calendar... *watches thread*

[b65ran]

this is going to be a cool feature if we can do it both for export and also to import using rss feed!!!

[silurius]

Syndication-type features I'd look for would be:

• Outbound and inbound Javascript, RSS or XML syndication of calendar content
• Some synchronization intelligence - updated events on one site carry changes to syndication recipients
• Flexible content type - e.g. events, news stories etc. as suggested above
• Customizable calendar fields to classify events
• Meta search capability - for example, pick an area of interest and an entire, current month calendar would pop up for that subject or theme.
• Integrative features to support some degree of compatibility with other calendar systems (e.g. Drupal Events project)

I am ok with the idea of some of these features being vBulletin only at this stage, given the potential complexity of integration with other platforms. (However I suspect the built-in syndication features which already exist could support external feeds with relative ease).

Areas of expansion that are also intriguing to me:

• Flexibility of calendar systems (see this site for a semi-comprehensive list). Ability to customize length of year, month, etc. This would not only support scholarly special-interest sites, but religions who observe non-Gregorian calendars.
• Ability to define historical timeline based on specific calendars, and to call on specific areas of this timeline in posts, when relevent discussion topics come up. Visually and structurally, this thing is kind of what I am thinking of.
• This is one example of what someone I'm working with refers to as his baseline for what he wants to accomplish: www.cosmopolity.org

Been chatting with folks associated with CivicSpace Labs, who are very excited about building a meta-calendar, and although I have faith that they can probably pull something off, I've also observed that vBulletin developers seem to be able to roll things out far more quickly and effectively in some cases, probably for multiple reasons.

[subnet_rx]

I'd also be interested in such an application.

[silurius]

Bump. Still willing to tip!