Quick and dirty RSS Calendar

January 12, 2009 8:16 AM

My nonprofit employer paid a lot of money for a custom PHP calendar that is not extensible, and I need to add at least RSS now.

Since it was a totally custom job (and not very well coded, either - it's basically dumping the results of a handful of mySQL calls) there don't seem to be any easy ways out of this. Are there any standard (and preferably easy) ways of building an RSS-based calendar from existing data out there? If anyone has any advice about dealing with recently-written but nonetheless crappy code that could help, too.

posted by mike_bling to technology (5 answers total)

Can you ignore the PHP and go straight to the mySQL database?
posted by Pants! at 8:22 AM on January 12, 2009

"Are there any standard (and preferably easy) ways of building an RSS-based calendar from existing data out there?"

What does this mean? What are you actually trying to accomplish?
posted by orthogonality at 8:43 AM on January 12, 2009

Your best bet is to pull directly from the database and output the query results in an RSS format. This is done pretty frequently, like this sql2rss.php script. In fact, this script may do exactly what you are looking for.
posted by camworld at 8:56 AM on January 12, 2009

Can you write a script to read the contents of the database into an ical file? You could then import it into something a bit more friendly, like Google Calendar.
posted by oclipa at 9:27 AM on January 12, 2009

RSS is not well suited as a "base" for a calendar. You really need to ask yourself WHAT should be in the RSS feed.

Do you want the past weeks' events? The upcoming week's events? All events for this month?

Spend a little time thinking about how the RSS feed is going to be used, because there is not just one way to get RSS out of a calendar.
posted by toomuchpete at 10:34 AM on January 12, 2009