vowe dot net :: From iCal to PHP iCalendar

From iCal to PHP iCalendar

by Volker Weber

After moving my calendar from Domino to iCal I was looking for a way to have access to my calendar while I am away from home, even if I forgot to carry Clyde with me. What I finally decided to install is PHP iCalendar. This is a php-based iCal file parser. Its based on v2.0 of the IETF spec. It displays iCal files in a nice logical, clean manner with day, week, month, and year navigation, printer view, RSS-enabled, and searchable. It supports 12 languages, is fully theme-able, and has complete timezone support. And it is open source.

The picture on the left shows iCal, the picture on the right is the same calendar rendered in Safari. PHP iCalendar supports any calendar application that can generate valid IETF 2445 files (.ics). Some of the supported applications are:

- Apple iCal
- Mozilla Calendar
- Ximian Evolution
- KOrganizer
- WinDates 5.0

Standards are a good thing. :-)

2003-10-12 :: email :: bookmark :: digg

Comments

Coll stuff: looks like I'm going to have to think about hacking something together to export Domino stuff now... ;-)

Ben Poole, 2003-10-12 12:55

Interesting idea. Because with iCal and the PHP iCalendar (and most likely with the other above mentioned packages) you can also consolidate calendars that you subscribe to. Apple has one site with a lot of those calendars, but of course there is also icalshare.com and other sites that have even more. Please note, that these are live subscriptions and not deep copies like we know them from the Notes Calendar in respect to holidays.

That is not going to be easy in Notes since it doesn't have a concept of multiple calendars per person. With iCal you can have, say three calendars: private, work and public. Then you share those with different audiences.

Volker Weber, 2003-10-12 13:15

True, but I'm sure I can come up with something... the nearest Notes has to multiple calendars is the concept of being able to mark certain entries as private. So my Notes-based calendar can actually contain a lot more that meetings -- but work meetings are oretty much all you see if you're anyone but me.

I haven't played with C&S in Notes 6, so I could be off the mark, but I'm very surprised if there's no ICS support at all.

Ben Poole, 2003-10-12 16:56

Does Notes iCalendar Support help?

Steffen Uhlig, 2003-10-12 19:08

Should do ;-)

Someone said they can't get it to work in 6.5, but that should be fix-able.

Ben Poole, 2003-10-12 20:01

Looks good. Caution however: When you use "import" you no longer have these in a separate file (like in iCal). You get a deep copy.

Volker Weber, 2003-10-12 20:08

I was looking for something the same but slightly different! I ended up installing PHP iCalendar and phpMyCal. I was looking for a way to actually edit iCalendars online and phpMyCal allows you to do that. Of course, things are a bit buggy right now, and I don't know enough php to change it and make everything work. Hopefully this guy will keep up the fight!

Josh Turse, 2004-08-15 21:06

Hi Josh,