How To Use the ICS Import Tool

EventON’s ICS import tool brings versatility by ensuring that events between your calendars remain in sync and helps to manage calendar events with ease and precision. In this guide, we will walk you through the step-by-step process of importing events from Outlook, iCalendar, and other calendar applications into your WordPress site. Once the events have been imported you can display them with ease using EventON’s shortcode generator.

User Guide

To get started, go to EventON > Settings > ICS Import.

On this page, you can customize how the events will be imported into your site by toggling the following options:

• Publish imported events – When this setting is enabled, all the imported will get automatically published on your site. If your calendar is configured to display future and past events, then the imported events will be visible immediately.
• Event processing timezone method – This select dropdown allows you to select what timezone will be used for the imported events. You can select from the UTC timezone, WordPress timezone(Configured in WordPress > Settings > General > Timezone) or set this to the default timezone in the ICS file.
• Use custom timezone for importing events – Enabling this option allows you to select a custom timezone that will be applied to the imported events and override the setting above.
• Disable auto-detect all-day events based on ICS event time – This setting checks the timezone that is set on your WordPress site and uses this as a reference for all-day events. Enabling this option ensures that all-day events are not automatically detected so that you can manually configure them after the import.
• Enable duplication event name check during importing – Enabling this option will create a validation system that helps avoid having duplicate events on your site.
• Sync already imported events if event UID matches in the ICS file – Enabling this option allows you to sync existing events on your site with the data from the imported file.
• Import past events as well from ICS file – Enabling this option allows you to override the default behavior of the import tool and import past events based on the starting time.
• Import Method – This option allows you to select your import method of choice. You can select from doing the import manually from an ICS file, manual import using an ICS URL, or a scheduled event from an ICS URL. You can create a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule to import events from the URL.

Here are some guides on how to get the ICS link from popular programs.

1. How to get ICS link from Google Calendar
2. How to get iCal public calendar feed link
3. How to get Outlook public calendar link

Import Process

For the purpose of this guide, we’ll go through the steps of importing events through a file.

Please select Manual import by uploading ICS File on the Import Method field.

Export an ICS file from your external calendar application and click on the Process ICS File button.

In the next modal window, click on the Upload File button and select the ICS file that you exported in the previous step.

Next, click on the Upload .ICS file button to kickstart the import process. If the file passes validation and some events are found in the file, a new window will open containing a detailed list of the events as shown below:

In this window, you can click on blue tick marks to deselect events that you’d not like to be imported. You can also expose more import options by clicking on the 3-dot button as shown below:

Once this button is clicked a drawer menu will slide in from the right side with the following settings:

The additional settings allow you to customize the calendar with the following options:

• Hide end time – Enabling this option will hide the end times of all processed events.
• Event User Interaction – This setting allows you to select the kind of event that will happen after the event has been added to your calendar and a site visitor clicks on it.
• Change Event Times by – This field allows you to fine-tune the event time by adding negative or positive time offsets.