WordPress Plugins for Google Calendar – Still Looking for a Solution

Feb 02 2009

Google Calendar
Image via Wikipedia

If you are a Google Calendar or Gmail user one of the easiest ways to keep track of events for groups and organizations is to create a Google Calendar for each group or blog.  But how do you display these events on your blog?  It turns out this is a little more complicated than I thought.  I have tried a couple of the different plugins but couldn’t get any of them to work.  Here is a look at the plugins and the solution for now. 

Use the Google Calendar Embed Code

Google calendar gives you the code to embed this calendar on your site.  You can set the width of the calendar to fit into the side bar or a page on your website.  You can embed the calendar on a page in your blog.  The code that google gives you to embed the calendar uses an iframe and while iframes are widely used it is better to not use them.

From Web Dev News

Frames and iframes are a bad idea when it comes to accessibility because screen readers can often find it difficult to determine which frame is the main frame and focus can become confused.

Frames can also cause problems with book marking and the accuracy of URLs.

 

What about the Google Calendar Feed 

Yes, each Google calendar has a feed but if you just display the feed from your calendar in the sidebar of your blog the items will post in the order of which they were added to the calendar, which is not necessarily in date order.

WordPress Plugin Options

Surprisingly there aren’t many plugins listed on the WordPress Plugins page for adding a Google calendar to your blog.  I tried this plug-in, Google Calendar Feed Parser, first and could not get it to work – I am not sure if the issue was that the plug-in is not compatable with my version of wordpress or not but this created a glitch in my code when I added it as a widget and took some work to get things corrected.

 

Looks Like a Good Choice but Doesn’t Work - WPNG-calendar

This plugin reguires a little bit of extra set up but offers lots of features including a widget and an option to create a page that displays the calendar.  All of the instructions are available on the plugin page and are easy to follow.  I followed all of the instructions but I couldn’t get it to display the calendar.  Looks like I am not the only person who couldn’t get it to work – lots of others have left comments on the WordPress.org forums.

Related blog posts about Google Calendar
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  • @kayle - wow how did you get WPNG to work? that is a good question about displaying multiple calendars on one site - especially for holidays. Maybe someone else has had success with this.
  • I actually got WPNG calendar to work on my site, but here's the problem. It only shows items I add to my calendar. It doesn't show any items from other calendars I've subscribed to..such as holidays, for example. Since I'm trying to put together a joint calendar for a school, subscribing to various other calendars such as the athletics calendar, the music dept. calendar, etc., and want them ALL to show up on the school wordpress site, this is fairly useless to me.

    When you use the embedded calendar, does it do the same thing? To me, the whole point of Google Cal is to SHARE calendars and combine them; why can I do that on google, but not show all of the dates in my wordpress site?
  • @Bob - thanks for sharing your solution - could you share the url for your site - I would love to see this in action.
  • Bob
    After many hours of research, trial and error I settled on a solution that I think will work for me.

    I display an embedded calendar (copy and paste the embed code from my google calendar) on a stand alone page.

    I also use a widget to display upcoming events from the calendar. For that I used the ICS Calendar plugin for WordPress. Powerfull and easy to set up. Some minor tweaking (change the default font color as an example) but I figured it out and got some help from the support forum for the plugin. Couple of minor details I'm still working on but otherwise I love it!

    Hope this helps someone!
  • I'm having the same problem. Google Calendar integration with blogger was easy. It seems very difficult with wordpress. I wish I could get the same basic layout as I had before in blogger in my new wordpress site.
  • @Dennis i know. I have yet to find a solution for this. Your site looks great - where did you find that theme? I have been having such a hard time deciding on which theme to use.
  • Facing the same challenge. Any solutions that you ran into recently? :D
    Thanks!
  • Hi Lindsay-

    Our blog is helping business, yes - just another way for us to communicate what we are doing out here in the vineyards! :) It is good fun.
  • admin
    Hi Joe - thanks for the comment. I know this calendar issue is a headache - it seems like it should be an easy problem to solve.
    Your website looks great - really nice use of a blog. Is the blog helping your business?
    Lindsay
  • Also looking for a good Google Calendar plugin to embed in posts as well as a sidebar widget.

    Keep us posted!

    Cheers,

    Joe.
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