Getting upcoming events onto a website has always been difficult. The ideal case for upcoming events:
- Show the event that's upcoming, in chronological order
- Expire the event once the time has passed
- Manage all of this with very little hassle
In our church, we have many different fellowship groups that maintain their own blogs, and having some sort of upcoming events is very critical.
This is where Google Calendar PHP comes in. It's a framework that takes in the XML file generated by Google Calendar, and turns it into something that's PHP-friendly. From there, there are hooks that allow developers to loop through and generate their own themes, outputting the necessary HTML.
- Show the nearest upcoming event
- Shows the first repeating event, and suppresses everything else (until the first event is over)
- Takes into account exceptions to repeating events
- User can quickly categorize an event as hidden, shown, or special
- Distinguishes location name ("Dana House") from physical address ("2440 Dana St")
- Installing framework onto your site -- mainly for developers
- How to use Google Calendar with the framework: read about the special syntax
This is a version 2.0 update to the original framework, hosted on Google Code. Themar 1.1 version allowed managing of multiple calendars (whereas 2.0 does not). In this update, I've tried to make the calendar load faster and more efficiently (while adding additional features). Thus, if you can't live without being able to manage multiple calendars, then please download the 1.1 version.