Sunbird

development (This post is more than 2 years old.)

So I'm really digging Sunbird as a calendar application. One of the neatest things it does is let you subscribe to a remote calendar feed. However, the feed is only in the iCal standard. Not that that is bad per se - but I don't know of any good websites that support it. Yahoo has a calendar service - but it has no syndication features at all. What I want is the ability to enter my events online, and then have access to them via Sunbird on any machine I use. Anyone know of a good (and free) calendar service that will output to iCal. If it had RSS output as well that would rock.

I'm actually contemplating on building my own. It wouldn't be that hard since I'd completely ignore the UI. I'd just have iCal and RSS output feeds.

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Archived Comments

Comment 1 by Critter posted on 2/10/2005 at 12:25 AM

can sunbird itself be setup as an online calendar?

Comment 2 by Joc posted on 2/10/2005 at 12:36 AM

Hi Ray,

One of the companies that I consult for use http://www.icalx.com/ for their online calendars. They seem pretty happy.

cheers, Joc

Comment 3 by Nathan Dintenfass posted on 2/10/2005 at 12:50 AM

On a related topic, check out:

http://www.icalshare.com/

Comment 4 by Charlie Griefer posted on 2/10/2005 at 1:07 AM

Any ideas if Sunbird can (or plans to) sync with pocket pc apps? (yes, i know i could probably go peruse the faqs...too lazy) :)

synching with my pocketpc is the only thing keeping me on outlook at the moment :(

Comment 5 by Raymond Camden posted on 2/10/2005 at 1:07 AM

Joc - it was a bit tricky to get it to work with Sunbird. But it seems to be working ok now. In a little bit I'll try another Sunbird install and see if I can view/edit from there as well.

Comment 6 by Max posted on 2/10/2005 at 1:08 AM

Do you know whether Sunbird allows sharing informations on a intranet? Such as tasks besides calendar?....

Comment 7 by Charlie Griefer posted on 2/10/2005 at 1:09 AM

ok...guilt got the better of me so i went and perused the FAQs :)

not too far down:
Does it synch with my Palm Pilot?
The calendar does not yet synch with your Palm Pilot.

since they don't even mention the ppc, i'm guessing it's even further off of their radar than the Palm :(

Comment 8 by Bill Rawlinson posted on 2/10/2005 at 1:35 AM

charlie,
i think the synching is dependant on the types of calendaring software you have installed on your ppc. If the app supports iCal then it should be possible to synch the to together.

As to Max and sharing informations on the interanet - yeah you can share tasks - again they are just stored in the iCal format. YOu just have to be subscribed to that persons iCal file.

One solution (not necessarilly the best) is to have the iCal file stored on a shared location and read it from there. A better solution is to use webDav and auto publish all of your calendars to the webDav server -then other users would subscribe to them via the webDav server.

I use a webbased calendar to publish my sunbird iCal files to my blog. Since my server doens't support webDav I have a simple batch file that uploads my iCal file and downloads my wifes. It makes for an easy sync operation that works nicely for both home and work computers. You can see the webcal at http://phpicalendar.net/ or my personal usage of it at http://rawlinson.us/calendar/

Its pretty nice. I think, if you look at the January calendar on my site I even publish a task.

Comment 9 by Joshua Shaffner posted on 2/10/2005 at 2:53 AM

I am not sure I understand. Does server have to be set up in certain way to allow us to publish calendar remotely (via sunbird)?

Comment 10 by Geoff Bowers posted on 2/10/2005 at 6:48 AM

I believe all you need is webDav set up on the server you want to share calendars on. The nice thing is you can pick and mix calendar feeds in the Sunbird interface allowing you to easily see what other people are up to.

Comment 11 by Bill Rawlinson posted on 2/10/2005 at 8:08 AM

the integrated sunbird publishing mechanism is via webdav - so if your server is webdav enabled then you don't have to do anything special.

However, if you don't have a webdav enabled server you have to work around that. I use a batch file that ftps my cal up and my wifes down. Overall, its pretty simple really. Whenever I'm done updating my sunbird calendar I just click on a shortcut and my calendar gets published to my webserver. And my copy of my wifes gets synch'd because I download hers. She does the same and we are always up to date with each others calendar.

I go into more detail here: http://rawlinson.us/blog/in...

hope that helps clear up the confusion I might have caused.

Comment 12 by Joshua Shaffner posted on 2/10/2005 at 10:06 PM

Gotcha, thanks!

Comment 13 by Johan posted on 2/11/2005 at 12:53 AM

http://www.rsscalendar.com/...

Comment 14 by Raymond Camden posted on 2/11/2005 at 1:05 AM

Nice one Johan - but I'm staying with the icalx site since it lets me write back to it from Sunbird.

Comment 15 by Johan posted on 2/11/2005 at 3:37 AM

I'll check icalx. Pity Outlook does not support iCal (as far as I know) as many business users are looking for a solution that integrates with Outlook - have you come across anything that would allow at least exporting from Outlook to iCal?

Comment 16 by Joshua Shaffner posted on 2/11/2005 at 9:16 AM

Ray, how did it go with updating your calendar from two different "locations"?

I tried icalx.com from two machines and it took me a while before I finally got a hang of sunbird's publishing/subscribing mechanism. I hope the next release will make this whole thing intuitive. Until then, this is what I had to do.

1) Create a local calendar with no publishing details

2) Publish a local calendar to webDAV enabled server

3) Delete the calendar you just created including its local file

4) Subscribe to remote calendar with automatic publishing checked

5) Repeat just #4 with another machine

Comment 17 by Joshua Shaffner posted on 2/11/2005 at 9:27 AM

Bill,

After playing with icalx.com, I went ahead and had my server webDAV enabled using web_dav apache module.

In your blog talking about webDAV and Sunbird, you mentioned that because you were not using Apache, you could not take advantage of web_dav module so you worked around using FTP mechanism with batch script.

I wonder if http://jakarta.apache.org/s... will do the trick in your case since it is java based?

Comment 18 by Raymond Camden posted on 2/11/2005 at 7:59 PM

Joshua - I was able to get it to work fine from 2 locations. It is a bit tricky - I kept getting 404 errors at first - but that was my fault probably. It could be easier for sure - but it works.

Comment 19 by Cutter posted on 4/5/2005 at 9:40 PM

Just wondering, has anyone tried to write a CF application to read/update an .ics file? I'm not as experienced a programmer as others who post here, and I haven't dived very deeply into all of the technologies I'm mentioning here, but looking at an .ics file it seems almost like an XML document. Has anyone (with more experience than myself) attempted to read in an .ics document as XML to manipulate?

Comment 20 by Ray Camden posted on 4/5/2005 at 11:18 PM

I haven't - but it looks mostly trivial. I'm still consdering writing my own app to let me do events and have it export both ICS and RSS.

Comment 21 by sMS posted on 3/6/2007 at 12:03 PM

My calendar does not yet synch with Palm Pilot.
Does it synch with my Palm Pilot?