For most web calendars, all you need to do is go into your calendar settings, make the calendar public, and copy the iCal feed URL. Once you have a public iCal feed URL, just navigate to Events in your Dashboard. Select the calendar and paste your iCal feed URL.
When using an iCal feed the Dashboard acts as a pass-through to get the events in your calendar, the events from the iCal feed will not populate or import in the Dashboard. If you want to add your third-party calendar to your website, you will want to get an embed code directly from your calendar provider to put on your website, rather than adding your iCal feed to the Dashboard.
Setting up your iCal Feed
We've used Google Calendar in our example, but the steps are similar for any calendar service.
1. Make your iCal feed public:
Select the kebab menu (⋮) and choose Settings and sharing
Scroll down to Access Permissions
Check the box Make available to the public
Accept the warning that this will make the calendar available, even through Google searches
2. Find your iCal feed URL:
Select the kebab menu (⋮) and choose Settings and sharing
Scroll down to Integrate Calendar
Copy the URL for the public address in iCal format
3. Add your iCal feed URL to your App:
Go to the Subsplash Dashboard
Select Mobile App in the Builder menu
Select your calendar tab and Edit (or head to your preferred calendar)
Paste the URL into the iCal Feed URL field
Click Publish or Save
iCal Feed FAQs
Where are my images/artwork?
iCal as a whole does not support images in the feed, with Subsplash being an image-heavy platform you will notice in the app there is gray or "missing" artwork for iCal events. In order to take advantage of artwork in the app the events will need to be created via the Subsplash Dashboard.
Why is HTML showing up in my events?
When utilizing iCal to populate events on your Subsplash app, it is not uncommon to see code (HTML) showing up in your event descriptions.
The Subsplash iCal reader currently supports iCal at its basic functionality. Since iCal itself does not support text formatting, some companies such as Google Calendar have created workarounds by applying HTML to their events. Since Subsplash only interprets plain text, this means that any formatting performed in a 3rd party calendar system (Bold, Italics, Hyperlinks, etc.) will result in the HTML being displayed as plain text in the Subsplash app.
In order to get around this issue, you'll want to remove any formatting or hyperlinks in your event descriptions. You can do this manually or you can simply copy your desired text and paste without formatting (Ctrl + Shift + V in Windows & Option + Cmd + Shift + V in Mac) back into your calendar event. Once this is done (and once the iCal field has had time to refresh), your events should show up without any HTML in the Subsplash App!
Can I have clickable links in my event descriptions?
You can make links inside your iCal event descriptions clickable by using a different calendar service, like Apple's iCloud Calendar because the iCloud Calendar system lets you enter an additional URL for each event, as well as an event description.
Setting up your Calendar on iCloud
Once you've set up a calendar, you can add a URL by creating a new event and adding a link to the URL field:
Once you've added events with links, grab the iCal feed URL to paste into your Dashboard:
iCal Feed Troubleshooting
Why are no iCal events showing in my app?
Most times when an iCal feed fails to load, it's due to one of the following problems:
The feed URL was pasted in the Dashboard incorrectly (with typos or "webcal://" at the beginning)
The feed contains too many events, and times out
The calendar is not set to be shared publicly
The feed is non-standard
The feed contains no events
Try removing events from the calendar, pasting the feed into the Dashboard again, and making sure the calendar is set to be shared publicly.
iCal feeds beginning with "webcal://" won't import correctly into the app, so simply replace "webcal://" with "https://"" and the feed should load correctly.
If the iCal feed is still not loading events, try re-creating the iCal feed with fewer events. A large number of events can cause an error and prevent the iCal feed from displaying. If you have a lot of events from the past or the future, try deleting those and re-creating the iCal feed.
If you've made sure to import your feed correctly, it successfully passes a validator, and you've shrunk the number of events, please contact us for further troubleshooting.
Why are my iCal events not populating in my Subsplash embed on my website?
Similar to the artwork answer, Subsplash embeds rely on the events being created in the Subsplash Dashboard. With the iCal capability being an app-only feature, you will want to use the platform or calendar's own embed options to add it to your website.
Why are only some events showing?
If you are using an iCal feed to display recurring events, it is important to note that only about 5 instances of a recurring event will show up at a time. We do this in order to ensure a reasonable load time when users are accessing the events.
Where are my images and locations?
Presently, iCal feeds do not display images or locations within your Subsplash app. iCal feeds were initially intended to just contain the bare minimum of a particular event, which is why they do not contain images or locations of the events passed in.
Why don't I see updates to my iCal feed?
When you update a Google Calendar that is brought into your app through an iCal feed, it can take some time to update. This amount of time can be anywhere from a few hours to a day. In addition, we cache the iCal feed on the app to reduce the use of data. We'll refresh this cache to pull in the latest data roughly every 1-3 hours. This means that there will be at least a bit of a delay, even after Google has updated the feed.