drupal | Thomas' Work Space

Our Drupal now allows Add to Calendar links.

2014/03/17 plagwitz Leave a comment

Neat: Click on the calendar icon at the end of the date line:
When prompted, Click open (which will stat your default file association for ICS files, likely MS-Outlook):
if necessary, add a suitable reminder, and click””save&close”
Your appointment, with location, will be put in your calendar and come alive when you need the reminder(and where, if you connect your other, home and mobile devices to MS-Exchange):
But as of yet, not everybody seems to be using this handy facility (I find myself manually copying over info into manually created appointments).
Unfortunately, this is still only a static ICS file, not a subscription which would be automatically updated in your calendar if the originator/organizer changes the schedule.

2014/01/22 plagwitz Leave a comment

Original:

2012/11/28 plagwitz Leave a comment

I am seeing once again a large number of events loaded as internet calendar into MS-Outlook via an iCal link default to the same day:
This time the iCal sources is Moodle, but it also displays the iCal feed internally so:
I observed a similar issue when loading certain Drupal calendars into MS-Outlook, only that

it seems to have affected only certain sites on the same (?) Drupal instance (is this user input error?)
Events defaulted to the current day in MS-Outlook – the Moodle issue does not.
All events were effected – not so in this Moodle issue.

2012/04/26 plagwitz Leave a comment

If you go to our university calendar webpages, you may see
2. a top menu allowing you to select either Year,Month,Week, or Day
3. a bottom right corner calendar icon (why not the well established ics icon?) which, changing with the view you selected, points to the same (directory) link as the views, but resolves to an ICS file when clicked in your browser
4. The default action on click is an open/save option: either way, AFAIK, you will download and point your desktop calendar application (e.g. MS-Outlook) to this file. Even if you do this only per year, this is not only tedious, but the hope that nothing will change in the course of things seems futile.
The best way that I have found to make this a live calendar subscription is this: in your ICS-compatible calendar application, where it asks you for the calendar URL, load one of the links provided under the calendar icon, e.g. that for the year. But before clicking “OK”, remove anything (= any filter) after “ical” portion of the link.
In MS-Outlook, this procedure looks like this: , and the result looks like this:
If you open the downloadable ICS, an open it (mental note: are there other iCAL readers to examine the data, short of loading the calendar into your desktop, phone or cloud calendar software?) you will notice that these calendars are a Drupal-based offering: “PRODID:-//Drupal iCal API//EN”
Sample Links

Calendar examples for your web browser: http://provost.uncc.edu/calendar, http://registrar.uncc.edu/calendar
Calendar year ICS examples for your calendar reader: http://provost.uncc.edu/calendar/ical/2012, http://registrar.uncc.edu/calendar/ical/2012
The provost’s calendar includes the registrar’s calendar: Administrative and Academic. the color-coding will be lost in translation when loading via ICS. I have not found a way to load the Administrative calendar separately, to use my calendar application to manage the coloring.
Are there more calendar pages that are of general interest?

2012/04/26 plagwitz Leave a comment

The (Drupal-based?) ICS linked for the ACADEMIC calendar does not display properly in MS-Outlook and other ICS-compatible calendar readers (all events form the Academic calendar seem to get display at the current date and time when this screenshot was taken. The ICS portion for the Administrative calendar does not seem to have the same problem).
Both do seem to display on the Provost webpage:
The same holds true for the underlying registrar calendar ICS that is aggregated by the provost’s page.
Some debugging information when loading http://provost.uncc.edu/calendar/ical : “You have subscribed to “p.”. 19 out of 169 events were successfully added to your calendar. There seemed to be some problems with the other events in the file you were importing.”