There are indeed hundreds of WordPress calendar plugins and one I found, amr ical events lists, appears to meet my requirements that it accept ICS feeds, be currently maintained, popular and free. A feature of these calendars, unfortunately, for my purposes, is infrequent ICS downloads, like once a day. This may be because sites hosting ICS object to be repeatedly queried and will cut off offenders. Of course, open meeting law itself means events are posted days in advance so immediate updates are not critical. My concern was a committee chair schedules a meeting then checks the town website to see if it's there and it won't be. But that's probably a training issue. And putting in a disclaimer is less of a problem now that I understand this stuff better. It is unlikely that the town's main website calendar will be wrong.
Regarding a possible feature add in
mytowngovernment.org, I agree that a link to the board is not needed. Also, maybe the agenda could go into the link's hover text (title). But I'm happy to go the plugin route. We'll probably use
mytowngovernment.org full calendar in an IFRAME on a separate calendar page and that will be up to date.
Error messages are being displayed when I used the ICS feed from
mytowngovernment.orgMessage displayed to logged in admin only:
Unable to create DateTime object from 2016-03-01 TC:20:23
DateTime::__construct(): Failed to parse time string (2016-03-01 TC:20:23) at position 11 (T): The timezone could not be found in the database
This appears to refer to "CREATED:20160301UTC2023000" in the feed ... it doesn't like the time entry starting with UTC. I have noticed that entries created by the automatic scheduler are not being reported as being invalid. So maybe "CREATED:20160301
UTC2023000" should be "CREATED:20160301
T2023000Z"
Example:
curl "
http://www.mytowngovernment.org/01085/calendar.ics"
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//
mytowngovernment.orgVERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:Montgomery\, MA Open Meetings
X-WR-CALDESC:Montgomery\, MA publishes their Open Meeting announcements at
http://www.mytowngovernment.org/01085. This calendar summarizes those postings.
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20160308T000000Z
DTEND:20160308T000000Z
DTSTAMP:20160308T000000Z
UID:ahNzfnRvd25nb3Zlcm5tZW50LWhychkL...@mytowngovernment.orgCREATED:20160301UTC2023000DESCRIPTION:Montgomery\, MA Broadband Advisory Committee\nhttp://
www.mytowngovernment.org/meeting/5850387764477952\nTo be determined\n
LAST-MODIFIED:20160301UTC2032000
LOCATION:Town Hall\, 161 Main Rd\, Montgomery\, MA 01085-9525
SUMMARY:Broadband Advisory Committee
SEQUENCE:1
STATUS:CONFIRMED
TRANSP:OPAQUE
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20160314T230000Z
DTEND:20160314T230000Z
DTSTAMP:20160314T230000Z
UID:ahNzfnRvd25nb3Zlcm5tZW50LWhychoLEg1TY2hlZ...@mytowngovernment.orgCREATED:20000101T000000ZDESCRIPTION:Montgomery\, MA Broadband Advisory Committee\n(regular meeting\, not yet scheduled)\n
LAST-MODIFIED:20000101T000000Z
LOCATION:Town Hall\, 161 Main Rd\, Montgomery\, MA 01085-9525
SUMMARY:Broadband Advisory Committee
SEQUENCE:1
STATUS:CONFIRMED
TRANSP:OPAQUE
END:VEVENT