The past few posts have been looking at the DAV family of protocols (WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV). Today’s post will look at how DPCalendar implements CalDAV so that you may use it to sync with your other Web-based calendars, scheduling software and various mobile devices.
Here at Digital Peak, we have made the decision that DPCalendar will fully adhere to the CalDAV open standard. Hence, DPCalendar supports the integration of CalDAV calendar services (e.g. iCloud, iCal, ownCloud) and offers CalDAV access to its native calendars (i.e. acts as a CalDAV server as well). When integrating, you can either subscribe to a CalDAV calendar or opt for full synchronisation (either way, changes made in DPCalendar will be reflected in your CalDAV calendars as well).
CalDAV integration
Like everything else DPCalendar does, integration with CalDAV-aware Web-based calendars (like iCloud or ownCloud) is implemented through a CalDAV plugin (for more information, visit https://joomla.digital-peak.com/documentation/58-dpcalendar/766-caldav-plugin; this essentially is the same way Google calendars are supported). You can even integrate DPCalendar from another site through CalDAV into your existing Joomla site. The plugin also integrates with calendars even if they do not have Web-based interfaces (e.g. desktop calendaring software) as long as they support the CalDAV protocol.
Acting as a client, DPCalendar’s CalDAV plugin supports the editing events on the remote CalDAV server. Essentially, if you have the Joomla permissions to edit the CalDAV details, then you can change the CalDAV integrated events (regardless of which calendars the events come from) directly within Joomla. This means that you can use DPCalendar to manage all of your calendars and schedules directly.
CalDAV server
DPCalendar can also act as a CalDAV server for its native events (for a more thorough description of how you can access DPCalendar through CalDAV, click here). In this case, you can use any CalDAV client to gain access to DPCalendar events and schedules. Each individual calendar set up on your Joomla sita via DPCalendar will be shown as its own entity in your CalDAV client. The ability to use DPCalendar as a bridge to your other external calendars (Facebook events, CSV plugin, or all the others) is not yet implemented, although it is technically feasible and will be considered if enough people put it forward as a feature request. However, DPCalendar can act as both a CalDAV client and server at the same time.
So to what kind of uses can you put DPCalendar’s support of CalDAV? The simplest use would be to use your Joomla site as an aggregator of everyone’s schedules; for example, if you want to plan a family dinner, you can simply link to all your relatives’ calendars, and immediately everyone who has access to your website can see who is free and when. For business purposes, you can also use CalDAV to subscribe to calendar feeds that include public holidays for various countries, so that your clients can see when your offices are likely to be open.
You see, there are no limitations? Almost everything is possible, connect DPCalendar to your CalDAV based cloud service or offer your own cloud service for events based on DPCalendar!