How to make iCalendar subscriptions on websites cross-platform?
The company I work for offers a custom, hosted CMS. We have a calendar
tool that allows clients to track events in the system.
A while back, I implemented iCalendar feeds into this tool. It works
great, except for when it comes to users "subscribing" to the feed.
What we are seeing is that for many people, they are getting simply a
".ics" file that they are then importing into their calendar app. When
this happens, it is a one-time action and people are not getting updates
to the calendar or the events (which is a big problem).
We have tried some things in the past (like using a "webcal://" URL, but
we got mixed results on that) but were not able to find a solution that
was consistent across different devices (desktops, tablets, phones) or
browsers.
This is becoming a huge problem for us as clients are starting to complain
about people not getting up-to-date feeds.
Is there a "standard" way to provide an actual "subscribe" link to these
feeds? Or, is there some kind of iCal property (maybe not a "standard"
property in regards to the RFC, but widely accepted in calendar programs)
that would make these different applications behave the way we need them
to when a feed is imported?
If there isn't a solution for this, we might just have to link out to some
documentation describing how to subscribe to feeds in the different
platforms. I'd like to avoid this as it would be a huge pain to be
thorough and to keep updated...
No comments:
Post a Comment