How to Display CiviCRM events on a Drupal Calendar using CiviEvent’s iCal Feed and the Drupal Calendar Module:

1. Pre-requisits: You’ll need an instance of CiviCRM running on Drupal, (we’re using Drupal 5.5 with CiviCRM 1.9) with CiviEvents Enabled.
2. Download & Install the following Drupal modules:
   1. Calendar: http://drupal.org/project/calendar
   2. Views (required by Calendar): http://drupal.org/project/views
   3. Date (required by Calendar): http://drupal.org/project/date
3. Go to your Module management screen ( Administer >> Site Building >> Modules )
   
   1. Enable Calendar View
   2. Enable Calendar iCal
   3. Enable all other modules required by these
4. Go to the “Administer Views” screen ( Administer >> Site Building >> Views)
   
   1. Set ‘calender’ view status to ‘enabled’
   2. Click on the ‘add’ link next to calendar

   

   3. On the “Add a View” Screen, under Access, select all the roles you want to be able to view this calendar.
   4. Go to the bottom of the page and click save
   5. You will now see ‘calendar’ listed under ‘existing views’
   6. Click on the ‘calendar’ link listed in that same row or go to the calendar url, which should be http://www.yoursite.com/calendar (if you have drupal installed in the base directory) or http://www.yoursite.com/drupal/calendar (if you have drupal in it’s own directory).
5. Go to your “Access Control” page. (Administer >> User Management >> Access Control)
   1. Under CiviCRM, make sure “register for events” is enabled for your anonymous role, and any other roles you are going to want to register for events.
6. From the Calendar page, you should see the following:
   
   1. Click on the “iCal” tab, and insert the following information:

   

   2. Under “Expire iCal cache:” I recommend setting this to ‘0 sec’ for debugging purposes, and then scale back based on your traffic and update timing requirements.
   3. Set the Name as anything, I went with “civi” to keep it simple.
   4. Set the Url to your civi iCal feed.  Should be something like:  http://www.yoursite.com/civicrm/event/ical?reset=1&page=1  or http://www.yoursite.com/drupal/civicrm/event/ical?reset=1&page=1 .
7. And that should be it!  Set up a test event, and make sure it shows up on your calendar page.

A major breakthrough for the web design & development communities…

Yesterday (March 5th), at the MIX conference in Las Vegas, the IE team announced the availability of a developer beta of IE8 Beta 1 for Download. 

This normally would not be such a huge deal, but the folks at Microsoft are actually trying to implement standards compliance.  What are we going to do with all of the extra free time generated by not having to kick our code in the pants until it renders correctly despite all of IE’s quirks?

 Not only are they “attempting” standard compliance, as they have tried, and failed miserably in the past.  They’re actually testing the fact this time!

We’ve contributed over 700 test cases to the W3C CSS working group because we think a comprehensive certification test suite for CSS is important for true interoperability and we support the W3C’s effort to deliver such a suite. The CSS spec is good, but contains many ambiguities, and a test suite will help resolve them and benefit web developers and designers.

Also, it sounds like IE8 is going to deliver full standards-compliant CSS 2.1 support by default, instead of requiring specialized mark-up to kick it into action.  This was a reversal in stance by the IE team, after a substantial outcry by the design/development community.  I can only imagine the possibilities if they actually make a habit of listening to their customers…

Read much more about the IE8B1 release at the IEBlog.