Allow team to import events from an iCal source

[Pierre Buyle]

The Belgian LoCo Team already has an event calendar on its website. And I bet many LoCo Teams already have their own calendars managed through various solutions. Currently, the only way to add events to the LoCo Directory is to add have a team member to add them manually.

This means that if such a team want to maintain it's calendar on the LoCo Directory and duplicate it on its own website, events must be added to the LoCo Directory by a team member then imported on the team website using the LoCo Directory API (or iCal feed, if available). Which require custom code since the LoCo Directory doesn't expose the events information in a any importable standard format.

It would be nice to have the option to import events and, as a side effect, venues from external sources.

It would probably increase usage of the LoCo Directory as a central community agenda. It also allow the LoCo Directory events management to be kept simple while enabling teams to use more powerful tools if wanted or needed.

It's likely that most solutions used by LoCo team support iCal export to stable URLs so this could be used as input format.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

It's not true that the team admin can only set up events. The whole team can, but this is subject to change, as soon as somebody gets around to changing this (bug 526800).

The LoCo Directory currently exports JSON for all forms of data (team data, venues, events, etc.) and iCal for events.

If we really want the LD to import data (security implications, etc.) we should file separate bugs for all these kinds of imports with specific format descriptions.

[Pierre Buyle (mongolito404)]

Sorry for the confusion about who is allowed to create Team events. But even with all team members allowed to create events, it means events have to be created (and updated) on LD before being imported in a team's own calendar solution.

I updated the bug title and description according to your comment.

[Jan Claeys (janc)]

+1 on Pierre's proposal to import events from locoteam sites based on a standardised format like iCal.

[Nathan Handler (nhandler)]

If the LoCo Directory does gain this support, I think it should not just import the events from the ical, but actually subscribe to the ical. By doing that, LoCos would not need to keep importing the ical whenever they make a change. Instead, the LD would periodically check all of the icals that it is subscribed to and detect any changes.