Q: my wife's iphone will receive calendar updates from my iphone and her ipad, but it won't publish calendar updates to my iphone or her ipad. Any ideas on solutions?

On her iPhone go to Settings>Mail, Contacts,Calendars>Default Calendar.  Here be sure it is set to your iCloud calendar and not something else such as On My iPhone.  If it isn't, make this change, then enter a new event and see if it appears on the calendar on icloud.com when you check from your computer.

If her default calendar is correctly set and it still isn't syncing new events to your calendar on icloud.com, add any missing events from her iPhone to the calendar on icloud.com.  When the icloud.com calendar is up to date, on her phone go to Settings>iCloud, turn Calendars to Off, choose Delete from My iPhone when prompted, then after a minute or so turn Calendars back to on to sync the icloud calendar back to her phone.  Then enter a new event and see if it syncs to icloud.com (and to the other devices) now.