PHP iCalendar Problem

Hi Andy,

On the publishing computer, select the published calendar. In the info drawer, make sure that 'publish subjects and notes' is checked, then refresh.

Best wishes

John M

I am also using PHP iCalendar, iCal, and Mozilla Sunbird (on my PC at work).

Regarding the "2 calendars max", are you using the 2.0 beta version? I have successfully gotten more that 2 calendars to be displayed. http://www.baizman.net/icalendar

There are some wierd inconsistencies between Sunbird and iCal. I don't know who is "right" according to the IETF spec, but I do know things are different, annnoyingly so.

- Sunbird creates all events marked as "Private" by default, so you need to make sure that the checkbox is left unchecked before publishing and/or exporting your calendar.

- Sunbird creates all events with a "Tentative" status by default. iCal by default creates events with no status. These events appear to Sunbird to be "Tentative", because there is no option for "no status".

- Sunbird uses Universal Time for events. However when copying events from a Sunbird-created calendar to an iCal calendar, the events don't have a time zone associated with them, so they show up at the wrong time until you manually add a time zone to that event.

Marc

Are you guys successfully using PHP iCal on Tiger? I thought when iCal 2 changed its approach to .ICS files, PHP iCal was left nonfunctional.

Previously I created an alias in my phpical directory that linked to the calendars in my user library. Now those calendars are gone. Have you guys edited the "config.inc.php" file to find the iCal calendars? Thanks for your help!

I am using PHP iCal on Tiger, but it's not nearly as easy as it used to be. 😟 Because of the f*cked up way iCal now stores calendar files (why, Apple, why?!?!), I did the following:

1) Set up WebDAV via apache on my local machine (non-trivial, but do-able if you're not afraid of editing httpd.conf files). Lots of tutorials on the web. Start here: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20020912065811863
2) In iCal, configure the publishing options to publish after each change and set the location to the WebDAV URL you just set up in step 1.
3) Change the config.php line to point to where you published the calendar. I usually had the PHP iCal files in a separate directory from the .ics files. Make sure you use absolute file paths. Relative paths should work too, but I had more success with absolute.

Any questions?

Thanks for the tips. It appears that the WebDAV publishing approach is the only way to get PHPiCal running again in Tiger.

The primary reason I used PHPiCal was for the combo calendar feature, which allowed you to see more than one iCal calendar at the same time. Now that iCal 2 has this functionality (through calendar group publishing), I guess I can stick to dotMac publishing and iCal. Thank you very much for the how-to. I may need to revisit it again some day...

Might consider the resources here: http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?postMessage_@@.68b72512

I suspect Apple has lots of wasted tech support calls because folks messed up their calendar files, thus the change in the way they store cal info (seems a little tougher for the avg. Joe to screw them up; JMHO).

re "Tentative" vs "None": If I recall correctly, the vcal standard simply uses numbers 0-10 for "Priority" and the application interprets this however it wants. Many apps don't use the full range (e.g. iCal only has 4 levels) but will interpret another apps numbers in their own lingo (e.g. in iCal, 0-1 = None, 2-4= Not Important, etc.; I'm just guessing at the range equivalents here). Apparently an app can use whatever words it wants to label the number. I'd prefer they all just used numbers but I also agree a number isn't very user friendly and 11 of them (counting zero), even more so. In the name of freedom/innovation, I suspect they deliberately chose not to assign specific names to the numbers, just as they left it open as to how many levels an app would offer.

So don't assume too much, other than to assume Apple likely has their own good reasons for what they do. They must get it right most of the time, otherwise we wouldn't be here.

Dancing Brook,

I'm not sure what you're referring to regarding to "numbers" for priority, but when I complained about the status, I was referring to this section [4.8.1.11 Status] of the the IETF specification here: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt. It's on page 88 (you'll have to scroll down to get there). It looks like this:

"statvalue = "TENTATIVE" ;Indicates event is
;tentative.
/ "CONFIRMED" ;Indicates event is
;definite.
/ "CANCELLED" ;Indicates event was
;cancelled.
;Status values for a "VEVENT"

When iCal creates a VEVENT, there is no STATUS field created by default. However, when Mozilla Sunbird creates a VEVENT, it creates it with a STATUS:TENTATIVE by default. This is what's going on at the lowest level, in the .ics file itself.

Does this make sense?