If you have been using other calendars like iCloud, Google calendar or MS Exchange and want to continue to use them, and you need to display their events on your Joomla website, DPCalendar supports integration and import of many different calendar systems. This chapter describes how the integration is done and how it can be activated.
External sources are included through Joomla plugins and are of type "dpcalendar". You can find them in the Joomla plugin manager. This means all the logic is implemented in its own plugin and does not touch the DPCalendar core code. The integration can easily be activated or deactivated through the publishing state of the plugin.
After you have installed DPCalendar, open the plugin in the back end. Now add your external calendar by clicking the New or Import button. Some systems like Google do require manual set up outside of DPCalendar and Joomla first, others like MS Exchange do need only username and password and an url. There are various adjustments you can do when editing the plugin. All the different settings are described below or in the corresponding plugin.
Every external calendar has system specific settings like OAuth tokens or uris and there are general settings like calendar color or permissions. We will explain here the general settings as the system specific settings are covered in the specific plugin article.
Integration means that the events in your external calendars are displayed within your Joomla calendar directly. But the external system is still the master of the events and DPCalendar is synchronizing the events from the remote source. For performance reason, the events are cached for a couple of minutes on your Joomla site to speed up page load. During synchronization, the database is not touched (except you have database caching activated). When the cache is expired a new APi call to the external calendar system is done. For example when you integrate your Google calendars, then a HTTPS call is made to googleapi.com.
Some systems are integrated in a two way sync mode, where you can edit the events within DPCalendar and they are updated directly on the remote system.
On the other site, when you import the events from your old calendar system into DPCalendar, then the import tool creates the event's in the database of DPCalendar (can be found under Components -> DPCalendar -> Tools -> Import). They are stored in the Joomla database and do loose all connections to the original event. This means you have migrated the events into the database of DPCalendar. The import does always create events in a calendar with the title in the plugin. More information about the import task, can be found in the Import external events article.
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