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The iCal feed

HappenBoard publishes your upcoming events as an iCalendar feed. Anyone can subscribe to it in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook, and their calendar then refreshes on its own as you add and change events.

The address

The feed lives at one fixed address on your own domain:

https://example.com/wp-json/happenboard/v1/ical/feed.ics

Replace example.com with your own domain. If your site still uses plain permalinks, the same feed answers at https://example.com/?rest_route=/happenboard/v1/ical/feed.ics instead.

Opening the address in a browser downloads or displays a text file. That is expected: it is meant for calendar applications, not for reading.

Choosing how far ahead it reaches

By default the feed covers the next 12 months. Add a months value to change that:

https://example.com/wp-json/happenboard/v1/ical/feed.ics?months=24

  • The default is 12 months.
  • The minimum is 1 month.
  • The maximum is 60 months, that is five years. A larger number is trimmed back to 60.

Whatever window you ask for, a single feed carries at most 5000 dates. A busy calendar with heavily repeating events can reach that ceiling, in which case shorten the window rather than lengthening it.

What the feed contains

  • Only published events. Drafts, pending and private events are left out.
  • Only dates from now onwards. Past dates are not included.
  • Every date of a repeating series as its own entry, so a weekly class appears once per week.
  • Dates you have cancelled inside a series are skipped.

Each entry carries the event title, its start and end times in UTC, a link back to the event page, the excerpt as a description, the venue address when there is one, and the event’s categories. Calendar applications convert the UTC times into the subscriber’s own timezone automatically.

Subscribing in a calendar app

The exact wording varies by application and version, but the shape is always the same: look for adding a calendar from a web address, and paste the feed address.

  • Google Calendar: in the left column, next to Other calendars, choose to add a calendar from a URL.
  • Apple Calendar: File → New Calendar Subscription, then paste the address.
  • Outlook: add a calendar, then subscribe from the web.

Some applications prefer a webcal:// address to trigger their subscription dialogue. If yours does, swap https:// for webcal:// at the front of the same address.

How often a subscribed calendar refreshes is decided by the calendar application, not by your site. Google in particular can take several hours to notice a change, which is normal and cannot be forced from the HappenBoard side.

The feed is public

There is no key, no token and no login on this address. Anyone who has it can read it, and search engines can find it if you link to it. That is deliberate, because a subscription feed has to be readable by services acting on the subscriber’s behalf. It exposes nothing that is not already on your public event pages, since only published events go into it.

Add the address to a page as an ordinary link, for example on your events archive or in the footer, with wording such as “Subscribe to our calendar”. Visitors who want a single event rather than the whole calendar are better served by the Add to Calendar block on the event page.

The other direction

This feed is HappenBoard publishing outwards. To bring dates the other way, from a file or another calendar into your site, see .ics file import. Pro goes further with a two-way Google Calendar sync.

What’s next