Gcal sidebar

What is it?

GCal Sidebar is a a wordpress plugin that pulls a calendar from Google Calendar and displays it in the sidebar of your blog. The current version is 2.2, There is one major feature missing and all known bugs have been fixed. It is used in many wordpress blogs. Where possible I try to pull as much information from the feed as I can. Follow the Gcal Sidebar news feed for updates.

How do I install it?

Download the latest version
Upload it to your WordPress server
Activate it.

How do I use it?

Get the calendar ID of the Google calendar you want to display, (Settings on the calendar drop down, then look for the Calendar Address entry in the table. Please note, the calendar must be a public calendar currently.
Log into your WordPress server.
Go to Appearance -> Widgets and add the Gcal Sidebar widget where you like.
Configure within the widget

What config options are there?

ID: This is the Google ID of the calendar you want to display.
Title: What do you want as the heading(or title) for this widget?
Title URL: Should the title link someplace? If so, where?
Max Results: How many entries do you want to display? (Default is 4)
Results offset: Ignore the first X number of events. Useful to display different portions of the same calendar in different widgets.
Display link to map: Enabling this feature will add a link to a Google map surrounding the Location of the event.
Single Event URL: Do you want each event to link to the same location? Or back to the Google page for that event?
Public or Private: Allows you to set the private key for a calendar.
Timezone Offset: This should never be needed anymore.

Contributors

Kevin Gruber – Funding display offset feature
Luis Esparza – Development of private calendar support
Brady8 – All day event support
Ned – Rich snippets support

What Can I expect in the future?

All of my planned features are here, If you would like, suggest a feature for GCal Sidebar

How much does it cost?

Gcal Sidebar is provided free of cost under the GPL (Gnu Public License). If you like it and use it, we do appreciate donations.

14 Comments

By Peter, February 5, 2010 @ 9:19 am

Hi,

I cannot get this to work with my public google calendar.

This is the error I get when I try using the xml, or the html, or the ical embed code.

Warning: SimpleXMLElement::__construct() [simplexmlelement.--construct]: Entity: line 1: parser error : Start tag expected, ‘<' not found in

Pls assist
By Kevin Gruber, February 5, 2010 @ 7:14 pm

Gcal Sidebar 0.4 works perfectly!

I take one more advantage of the result offset function: I use a theme with 3 featured sidebar columns. The widget is multiple, so I place Gcal widgets in each column. In the widget of the left I display the upcoming event. In the middle column I display the 2nd event. In the 3rd column I display the next event as an event preview.

So the screen result looks like a newspaper page with 3 justified event articles in order from left to right.

I like this feature! It´s brilliant!

Thank you!
By Ian, March 15, 2010 @ 11:35 pm

I would be very interested in this plugin having multiple calendar support and also an ability to put directly in a template with a function, instead of just a widget.
By admin, March 16, 2010 @ 9:20 pm

Multiple calendar support is somewhat problematic, but it is on my list of things I want to do. It used to have function support before I made it a class. I’ll look into adding that function again.
By Chris Hajer, March 20, 2010 @ 9:35 pm

I would like to see multiple calendar per widget support as well. If you’d like someone to beta test for you, I’d be happy to.

Thanks
By rjune, March 20, 2010 @ 11:50 pm

I’m actually working on that feature right now. It’s a pain, because the config has to change a bit. You can see what I’m doing at http://testing.oriontechnologysolutions.com/ That’s my dev setup, and it changes often and irrationally, depending what I’m working on.
By rjune, March 21, 2010 @ 6:52 pm

Ok guys, I’ve got 2.0 ready for testing. It has multiple calendar support. http://www.oriontechnologysolutions.com/download/gcal-sidebar/gcal-sidebar.2.0.zip
By rjune, March 21, 2010 @ 7:45 pm

I forget to mention. to specifiy multiple calendars seperate calendar IDs with a ‘,’. So if you wanted CAL1 and CAL2, then specifiy CAL1,CAL2 in the ID field
By Ned, March 29, 2010 @ 9:03 am

Great plugin! I made some very minor modifications to lines 427-445 so that the events will be parsed by google’s rich snippets tool (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets). I put the mods here: http://modwheel.org/gcal-rich.txt
By Danny, April 8, 2010 @ 10:54 am

This is a great widget. It got better when I found out it supported Multiple Calendars!! If I would like to change the line spacing, which file would handle the html output?
By rjune, April 8, 2010 @ 12:02 pm

There are only two files, the plugin file and the readme. You can edit the stylesheet for your feed, or the display_feed function in the plugin file.
By xovut, May 27, 2010 @ 2:27 am

Hi rjune, great calendar plugin! I had the same issue as some of the others when i first installed. Showed the date (1 Jan 1970 730am – 730am) when I first installed it. Upon inputting events it went away. Would the problem come back once the events have ‘expired’?

The second thing I wanted to know is how I could put a subscribe to this calendar button at the bottom of the widget.

Your help is appreciated. Thanks!