Eventbrite Calendar Feed

Screen Shot 2013-02-25 at 9.16.20 AMI volunteer and provide technical support for a few non-profits, one of which is the Project Management Institute San Francisco Bay Area Chapter (http://www.pmi-sfbac.org) where I serve as the VP of Operations and CGO.

One of the moves I made in my first year with them was to migrate our event calendar to Eventbrite and Meetup. One of the gaps I found with Eventbrite is that it doesn’t have a way to provide a feed of events that can be used to update an external calendar, so I embarked on a little programming effort to create one.

Most calendar programs allow you to pull external events using the iCalendar (ics) format, and Eventbrite actually has a pretty decent API to allow you to pull the events, so I decided to write a simple PHP script to allow me generate an iCalendar feed.

Screen Shot 2013-02-25 at 8.47.53 AMThis started as a simple one-off for PMI-SFBAC, but has turned into an open source project at https://code.google.com/p/eventbrite-ics/

Looking at the code, you can see it’s pretty basic, just a few PHP classes, some unit tests, Netbeans project and data.

Once the code was working, I used the iCalendar validator at http://severinghaus.org/projects/icv/ to make sure the results are good, and (at least for PMI-SFBAC) they are.

Eventually this results in a URL that I used as a feed into the All-in-One Calendar from Time.ly which lets me show events on my site’s calendar along with any other iCalendar feeds I choose to add.

Screen Shot 2013-02-25 at 8.59.20 AMTo configure the All-in-One calendar, I just go to the Events in the WordPress admin panel, and add the feed.

After I add the feed I click the “Refresh” button to make sure the events show up on my calendar immediately. The events then get updated on a periodic basis (daily by default), and should keep you up to date.

Screen Shot 2013-02-25 at 9.06.58 AMAnother use I put this feed to is to add the Eventbrite calendar to my Google Calendar.  I have a calendar feed from Meetup, and several of my friends so that I can quickly see what is going on that day.

The same basic idea for Google Calendar: you go to your Google Calendar, click the drop down on “Other Calendars” and choose “Add by URL”.

This gives you a nice view of events so that when you are scheduling things you can see what’s coming up that you might be interested in.

For those of you poor souls still using Outlook, the same feed can be used there as well see: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/view-and-subscribe-to-internet-calendars-HA010167325.aspx

 

 

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Comments

6 responses to “Eventbrite Calendar Feed”

  1. Kania Avatar
    Kania

    I can’t find this code, is it still available?

    1. Rob Weaver Avatar

      Yes, the code is still at https://code.google.com/p/eventbrite-ics/source/checkout.

      I haven’t used it in some time, so not sure if it works with the newer versions of the calendar

  2. Tom Avatar

    Hi there, This question might not be related to what you do but do you know if there’s a way to pull in info from multiple sources into a single WP calendar?

    I’m setting up a WordPress site, I want to have a calendar I can add events to AND I want to be able to pull in additional events from my Eventbrite account. Do you know if this is possible? I wondered about pulling the Eventbrite events into a google calendar then pulling the google calendar events into a WP calendar. That would enable me to add events in the Google calendar outside of the Eventbrite calendar. Your thoughts?

    1. Rob Weaver Avatar

      If I understand your question correctly, yes you can use this to integrate your Eventbrite into Google Calendar.

      In essence this approach sets up an iCalendar feed that can be used by any calendar program that understands iCal – I have used it with Google Calendar and Outlook.

      In both cases it is added as another calender in the application

  3. Brent Van Dyke Avatar
    Brent Van Dyke

    Hi There,
    I’m really interested in getting this to work with my eventbrite account and website, but I’m a little lost.
    Any chance I could get some assistance with what code to run?
    I’d love to talk about it with you.

    Brent

    1. Rob Weaver Avatar

      Sure I’d be glad to work through it – I haven’t used it for a while, but was thinking about reviving the project to see if it still works anyway.

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