The events calendar that is included with our Essentials and Premium plans allows for two-way syncing with external calendar tools like Google Calendar and iCal. If your club has an external calendar and would like to include events on it in the built in events calendar scroll down to the Adding a Calendar Feed section. If you would like to add Subscribe buttons to your calendar so that members can pull club events into their personal calendars read on.
Adding Subscription Buttons
The events calendar supports adding three different types of subscription links to your calendar. You can enable any or all of them according to your club's preferences. The three types are:
Google Calendar
Webcal -- a general format that most calendar tools support
iCal -- used by Apple devices
The official events calendar documents for adding subscription links (or buttons) are here.
The subscription links, and the events calendar itself, are displayed on your site via shortcodes -- snippets of specially formatted text that are replaced with content when the webpage is rendered. The shortcode for a Google Calendar link, for example, looks like this:
[eo_subscribe type='google']Add to Google[/eo_subscribe]
The text Add to Google will be displayed to a website visitor as a hyperlink that will open the users Google Calendar and prompt them to subscribe to the club's events calendar. You can replace that text with whatever you like. The three shortcodes the calendar supports are:
[eo_subscribe type='google']Add to Google[/eo_subscribe]
[eo_subscribe type='ical']Add to iCal[/eo_subscribe]
[eo_subscribe type='webcal']Add to Other Calendar[/eo_subscribe]
Below is an example layout you might use on your calendar page to show subscription links for each service at the top of the calendar.
That will render onscreen like so:
Synchronizing External Calendars
The events calendar also supports pulling events in from different sources via an ical feed. ical is a standard format and doesn't refer specifically to Apple calendars.
The official instructions for adding ical feeds can be found here.
In the following steps we show how you would integrate a Google calendar with your club's events calendar using it's public ical feed. Google's official instructions for sharing a calendar can be found here.
1. Go to https://calendar.google.com and click on the Settings icon at the top right and then on the Settings submenu item.
2. Scroll down to the Settings for my calendars section and click on the name of the calendar you wish to share. In this example we're sharing a calendar called Club Events.
3. In the settings for that calendar go to the Access permissions for events section and click on the box next to Make available to public.
4. Finally, scroll down to the section Integrate calendar and copy the link labeled Public address in iCal format:
NOTE: Make sure you select the ical address, not the Public URL link.
5. In your Member Splash site go to Settings -> Event Oganiser and click on the Import / Export tab at the top of the screen. Under the iCal Feeds section enter a name for the calendar you wish to synchronize (choose anything you like, it's just for your own reference) and enter the ical address from the step above.
6. Once you have added the feed the final step is to set how frequently you would like it to check the external calendar for changes. For most cases Twice Daily is more than enough.
IMPORTANT: The feed will not sync until you select a schedule. Also, note that the sync is one-way, from the external calendar to the club events calendar. Editing an imported event will not change it on the external calendar and local changes will be overwritten on the next sync. If you wish to change the event you need to make the changes on the source calendar.
To perform a manual fetch you can hover over the table row and click on Fetch now underneath the calendar title.
