Getting a calendar on your website, part 2

Last week I told you about my experience with creating an iCal format calendar and posting it to the web. I had 'cheated' and used an online service to generate the calendar, framing it into the site.

Not content with that solution, I decided to try installing the latest version of iCalendar, the open source web calendar tool (the service I was using is still using 0.9, I installed 1.1). I deeply appreciate the geeks who create this stuff, but they don't provide a lot of documentation. The coolest thing about this new version is that I can display more than one calendar at a time. Anyway, here is a walk thru in installing the application for non-code-geeks, assuming you have a host with PHP capability.

1. Download the package, which is a tar.gz file. This was one of my big problems. The gz file is easy to open with an unzip tool (I use PowerDesk Pro), but I didn't know how to open the resulting .tar file. Instead of just double-clicking it, I had to manually select it for extraction from PowerDesk. Now I've got a bunch of files in a folder.


2. Open the readme file. Not as easy as it sounds, since the file doesn't have an extension. I found WordPad the easiest to work with (or use Word). The readme doesn't tell you too much about installing, and is targeted at Mac users installing on their own Mac server, so let me summarize for you: Create a folder on your server ('phpicalendar' is the most convenient name, to match their defaults) and then copy the files you expanded into the folder. How simple!


3. Here's where I screwed up at first. I would check to see how the default installation worked out by going to www.mydomain.com/phpicalendar/index.php. I didn't do this, but if you do, I think you should find that it is up and working. There are three sample calendars installed already (something I didn't know until later). I jumped right to the next step:


4. Edit on your local machine the config.inc.php file. I used WordPad again, which automatically formats in a readable layout and saves the file as php type. Go thru the settings...most you don't have to worry about, but there are a few regarding 'paths' which you should pay attention to. If you are hosting your .ics (iCal) files elsewhere like me so you can use WebDAV publishing, don't worry about the paths to them. This slowed me down considerably.


5. When editing the config, set the admin.php page to be active, and leave verification via FTP (uses your FTP account logon/password).


6. Save and upload your config.inc.php file to overwrite the one you initially put on the server. Now go check to see how the calendar looks on the web.


7. Go to the admin.php page by typing it in your web browser. After logging in, you will see that the only thing you can do is add and delete calendar files. I cut-and-pasted the URL for my .ics file at my webDAV host to add it. I tried deleting the sample 'home' and 'work' calendars from here, but it didn't work. Instead, I deleted them via FTP.

With all that done, your calendar should be up and working. I still need to figure out how to integrate it with the rest of my website, but you can take a look at the result. I think this is sooo cool!