Display your iCal Calendars on any website.

iCal is an application with Mac OS X that works really well. iCal is a simple to use Calendar with some powerful features. With iCal you can subscribe to Calendars over the internet from sites like iCalShare and Apple (Subscribing to calendars is a quick and easy way to bring events into iCal. For example if you follow a sports team you can subscribe to a calendar for them instead of manually setting up all the game days in iCal manually.)

Not only can you easily subscribe to Calendars, now you can publish your iCal to any website (not just to 'dot Mac' or a WebDav site.) The setup to do this could certainly be easier in my opinion, but it should only take about 10 to 15 minutes if you have web space and know how to use an ftp client, the software needed is free.

phpicalendar scalp


Here is a step by step guide to publishing your iCal Calendars to a web space.

  • Download iPHPCalendar and Pygmy Software's Scalp.


  • Install Scalp, the install routine works great.


  • Unarchive and upload iPHPCalendar to your web space. You can use any folder name that you like, ie: http://www.MacSeven.com/ical


  • After uploading iPHPCalendar you will want to delete the sample calendar's in the .../ical/calendars folder otherwise these will display when you go to view the calendar. The sample calendars are shown below, and have the ics extension.


  • sample calendars


  • I had to turn off caching for my install to work, if needed you can turn off caching.

  • To turn off caching, edit the config.inc.php file, make sure the $save_parsed_cals value is set to no.

    turn off caching

  • Change permissions of the ical folder and contained files to 755.

  • I used CyberDuck to do this, I'm sure most ftp clients can do this also.
    From CyberDuck, I located my ical folder, and did option+i to bring up an information dialog, then I clicked the settings as shown below.
    Be sure to select the Apply changes recursively option, and click apply.

    Picture 4



  • Now the web space is ready to go. You may want to pause at this time and go to the ical url to see if it is working properly. Remember to turn off your cache if it mentions that. There is also a support forum for PHP iCalendar should you need further assistance.


  • Time to publish your iCal Calendars to the webspace. Open iCal and select a specific calendar or group, and go to the menu and select Calendar | Publish. Where it asks you Publish On, select a Private Server. Enter the ftp address to the .../ical/calendar folder, your username and password, select Publish changes automatically, and click Publish.


  • You are now done, your iCal website will now be synced with the iCal on your Mac. It would be fantastic if you could edit and add appointments and events from the web iCal and have it sync back to your Mac, but this setup doesn't allow for that.


  • Tip: Earlier I mentioned the power and benefit of subscribing to Calendars. However, iCal won't let you Publish a subscribed Calendar. However, I found a workaround. If you create a Group in iCal, and add a subscribed Calendar (or multiple) to it, you are allowed to Publish the Group.


  • group of subscribed


  • Tip: you have to publish Calendars individually, which may be a bit of a pain to initially setup, but his is nice control - you don't have to publish everything, you can be selective.


  • Tip: If the preferences don't work for you for things like setting the default calendar type displayed when you go to the iCal web page (this preferences didn't work for me) you can change this in the same config.inc.php where the Cache can be turned off. To make the default view Month instead of Week, you can change it as shown below.


  • display view



    Enjoy.

    A shout out to Dylan for letting me know about PHPiCalendar and Scalp.

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