HappenBoard publishes all your upcoming events as an iCal feed: one web address that people add to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Their calendar then shows your events and picks up your changes by itself.
The feed is always on. There is nothing to switch on.
Find your feed address
Your feed lives at this address, on your own domain:
https://example.com/wp-json/happenboard/v1/ical/feed.ics
Replace example.com with your domain. If your site uses plain permalinks (addresses like ?p=123), use https://example.com/?rest_route=/happenboard/v1/ical/feed.ics instead.
Opening the address in a browser shows or downloads a text file. That is expected: the file is made for calendar apps.
Share it with your visitors
Add the address as a link on a page, for example on your events page or in the footer, with words such as “Subscribe to our calendar”.
Some calendar apps open their subscription window only for a webcal:// address. Replace https:// with webcal:// at the start of the same address.
To add a single event rather than the whole calendar, visitors use the Add to Calendar block on the event page. Its .ics file button downloads that one event, not the feed.
Subscribe in a calendar app
The wording changes from one app version to the next, but you always add a calendar from a web address:
- Google Calendar: next to Other calendars, click +, then From URL, and paste the address.
- Apple Calendar: choose File → New Calendar Subscription, then paste the address.
- Outlook: choose Add calendar, then Subscribe from web, and paste the address.
The calendar app decides how often it checks for changes. Google Calendar can take several hours, and your site cannot make it go faster.
What the feed contains
- Published events only. Drafts, pending and private events are left out.
- Dates that have not ended yet. A date in progress stays until it ends.
- Every date of a recurring event as its own entry, so a weekly class appears once per week. Cancelled dates are left out.
Each entry carries the title, the start and end, a link to the event page, the excerpt as a description, the venue name and address, and the categories. All-day events stay on the right day wherever the subscriber lives.
A password-protected event is listed with its title, dates, place and link, but never with its description.
Choose how far ahead it goes
The feed covers the next 12 months. Add months to the address to change this:
https://example.com/wp-json/happenboard/v1/ical/feed.ics?months=24
You can ask for 1 to 60 months. A larger number is brought back to 60. A feed holds at most 5,000 dates, so if you have many repeating events, use a shorter window rather than a longer one.
Multilingual sites
With WPML or Polylang, the feed lists the events of one language: your default language. With Polylang, add lang to the address to get another language, for example ?lang=fr for French. To combine both settings, write ?months=24&lang=fr. See multilingual sites.
How quickly changes show up
Your site keeps a ready-made copy of the feed for up to one hour. It makes a new one as soon as you change an event, a venue, a category or the address of your events. Calendar apps may reuse what they downloaded for five minutes.
After that, the delay is the calendar app’s own schedule.
The feed is public
The address has no password and needs no login, because calendar services must be able to read it for their users. Anyone who has the address can read it. It only contains what your public event pages already show.
The feed only goes one way, from your site to calendars. To bring events into your site, see importing an .ics file.
Next steps
- The Add to Calendar block: let visitors save one event.
- Importing an .ics file: bring events from another calendar into HappenBoard.
- Syncing with Google Calendar: a two-way sync with Pro.
- Multilingual sites: one feed per language.