Publishing a Public Calendar

I had a need to publish a calendar for our customers. You'd think this is a pretty easy thing but you have to think about Web, Mobile, and Clients like Outlook that might want to view or subscribe to the calendar. The other pain is time zones. You might want to present the calendar in different ways. The problem I saw had perhaps a single software solution to handle the event storage + display, but in the end there were two solutions in place with one storing the data, and the other displaying the data.

If you want the TLDR then you can see one view of the calendar here; https://kb.filewave.com/link/872 and know that I store the data in Radicale ( https://radicale.org/ ) and display it in Open Web Calendar ( https://github.com/niccokunzmann/open-web-calendar ).

The longer story is that I set up both solutions and what you see in my Knowledge Base is the Agenda view of OWC. In OWC it has a simple wizard to pick how you want one or more calendars to display and then gives you a URL and iframe to get to the calendar formatted just how you like it. Since that HTML drives the look and feel you can have the Agenda in one place and maybe the Monthly view in another. Customers can also click on any event and add it to their own calendar or take the ICS feed and have a copy of the entire thing. Super flexible and easy.

For Radicale it was a default install, but I changed the rights file to allow anonymous read/only access to the calendar so that I wouldn't have to have authentication since this is a public calendar. At first I tried the Calendar app on macOS to populate events but I soon found that it didn't display right. In the end Thunderbird was a much better calendar client. There's not too much to say about Radicale because you pretty much just set it up, enable public read of the calendar and connect Thunderbird to it as a calendar. Thunderbird will authenticate to make changes.

So that's just a quick summary of a problem I solved for. I'll likely improve how I use OWC over time but so far it's a good start. Next I have to work on integrating the monthly calendar in to our public website so that it's easy to find, but since OWC has control over colors and styles it should be fairly easy to make it look like it fits right in there. If you'd like more details on any aspect of this just let me know since this was a fairly light article.