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Display iCal calendars without WebDAV or .mac Apps
I found yet another great way to publish iCal calendars today: PHP iCalendar.

It's fast, easy, and requires only that the server support PHP, which is great for those of us with 'virtual host' style web accounts who want to publish iCal data. Exported calendars are parsed into HTML by the package, as well as making a webcal:// link and offering the calendar for static download (as an .ics file*).

With a bit of HTML/PHP work, you can customize the output to look however you'd like. In my case, I wanted to just focus in on three days next month, which was simply a matter of rearranging parts of a template.

Users can subscribe to the calendar, sync it to a handheld, and have a portable conference schedule (how's that for connected?). Since the calendars are just kept in a subdirectory, adding and indexing them is a cinch. For keeping your published calendar up to date, the previously mentioned CalSync can automate the process.

Note: Adding the line AddType text/calendar .ics to an .htaccess file will insure users are prompted to download the calendar source, and not display it in the browser.
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Another way
Authored by: Elander on Oct 23, '02 12:51:00PM

Just as easy, if you have the latest version of GoLive (6.0). On the second CD that came with the application you have "Adobe Web Workgroup Server". It is a WebDAV server based on Tomcat, with a really nice graphic interface and easy configuration of users and groups.

It took a newbie in our office less than five minutes to install and configure as a calendar server for iCal.

You can use almost any old computer, as long as it can run Windows 2000 or Mac OS X to host the server.

As a bonus, you can use this as a workgroup server for your team. Since Mac OS X can connect to any WebDAV server, you don't even need to use Adobe applications, although they give you more options by way of the alternatives in the Workgroup sub menu in the File menu...



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Another way
Authored by: Jay D on Oct 23, '02 01:44:53PM

Yes, that's certainly a way to do it, but I was happy to find something that didn't require WebDAV (since I'm not the administrator of the server the calendar lives on). Is the idea that GoLive makes HTML out of the iCal source? (which was another goal of mine -- for those w/o the iCal app to view the calendar) Or just that there's an easy-to-use server bundled with GoLive?



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Another way
Authored by: Elander on Oct 23, '02 02:12:55PM

Just the easy server bit... (and the pretty useful workgroup functions).

GoLive won't do squat. As far as I can tell, iCalendar doesn't use XML, but vCalendar, an older format, so you can't even set up a translation through XSLT. If iCal had used xCalendar instead, it might have been an interesting project to try in GoLive.

However, since the server is actually a web application served by Tomcat, I suppose you could build a JSP version of PHPiCalendar in GoLive, but that wasn't my point. Hm, come to think of it, I do need an interesting project to play with, while learning JSP. I might be back with something along those lines later... thanks for the tip!
:-)



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PHP iCalendar Rocks
Authored by: thinkyhead on Oct 23, '02 06:03:07PM

We're using PHP iCalendar on our intranet and it's really nice. I made an additional PHP front-end to list users' calendars and allow our employees to submit their own .htaccess logins for DAV. (A cron job does the actual work of adding users to the root-owned .htaccess file.) The total package makes it possible for PC users to view the calendars of Mac users. And if PC users want to drop their own .ics files into the WebDAV folder they're free to share their calendars with Mac users. Open standards like WebDAV and .ics make it all possible!



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Display iCal calendars without WebDAV or .mac
Authored by: theladyboo on Apr 01, '03 09:04:45AM

This is absolutely, positively cool and I am going to enable for my
www.onlymacintosh.com users. Thank you to whoever created this!

I didn't want to enable webdav and I love PHP so this is PERFECT!!

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the only thing better than a hot latte on a cold morning is a cold latte on a hot morning!



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