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Calendar Event Sync

An Outlandish Plugin

This plugin adds a WP-CLI command to authenticate with a Google Calendar and sync events from it to your WordPress instance; storing them as posts with a post_type of event.

It uses WordPress actions to allow you to hook into this process and add any additional metadata to each event that you would like.

Installation

To install this plugin you will need to use composer to install it from packagist using the following command

composer require outlandish/calendar-event-sync

You can now enable this plugin in your WordPress Admin.

Basic Usage

Setting the Google Cloud project

To begin using this plugin to sync Google Calendar Events, you will need to create a Google Cloud project with access to the Google Calendar API. You can create one from this page:

https://developers.google.com/calendar/quickstart/php

You will need to create this project with the Google account you intend to sync the calendar items with, as a Google Cloud project that hasn't gone through a review process and been made public can only access resources for the account that it was created with.

After creating the Cloud Platform project download the client configuration details, and keep them for later.

Setting up the WordPress project

You'll want to add some new constants to your wp-config.php file (or if you are using roots/bedrock to your config/application.php file). The constants that you must set are

GOOGLE_CALENDAR_CLIENT_ID
GOOGLE_CALENDAR_PROJECT_ID
GOOGLE_CALENDAR_CLIENT_SECRET
GOOGLE_CALENDAR_ID

The GOOGLE_CALENDAR_CLIENT_ID, GOOGLE_CALENDAR_PROJECT_ID and GOOGLE_CALENDAR_CLIENT_SECRET are all provided to you in the credentials.json file that you downloaded when you created the Google Cloud Project in the previous step. The GOOGLE_CALENDAR_ID will be the email address of the Google Account that you created the Google Cloud project with (or if your project has been reviewed and published can be any email address). You will need to have access to the Google Account that owns this Calendar when authenticating to allow the plugin to download events from the calendar.

Authenticating on the command line

To authenticate the plugin to access the calendar of your Google Account, run the following command using wp-cli

wp events auth

This will output a url that you should open in a browser. It will ask you to log in with a Google Account, and then ask you to provide the project with access to your calendar.

Once you have gone through this process, you will be presented with an Authentication Code, which you copy and then run the following command

wp events auth <auth-code>

Passing the Authentication Code as the argument to the previous command will start the process of fetching an Access Token from Google and then storing that Access Token in the WordPress database.

You should now be able to run the command to fetch events from the calendar and store them to your WordPress instance as posts.

wp events sync

Once the command has finished it will report a successful import and tell you in the command line output how many events were fetched and how many were stored.

If you run the same command again, you will see that while 300 events were fetched, no events should have been stored. This is because before storing an event, it will check if one already exists with the Google Calendar Event Id.

Viewing your events

This plugin doesn't register the an Events custom post type with WordPress, so if you would like to view the posts that were created by the plugin you will need to do that for your WordPress project separately. However, as long as you create a custom post type with the post_type of event you will be able to see all the data that was saved.

By default the only data about the Google Calendar Event that the plugin will save is the Summary of the event (which it saves as the title of the post), and the ID of the event (which it saves both as post metadata and as the slug of the post). Of course, this isn't very useful, so you will want to do a little more, which you can find out more about in Advanced Usage below

Advanced Usage

By default the Google Calendar Event only stores the bare minimum it needs to save the event as a WordPress post. It does this, as it does not want to assume anything about the way that you want to store your event data.

Adding more metadata

You can add additional metadata from the Google Calendar event to the WordPress post, by adding a new function to your theme and calling it during the outlandish/calendar-sync/adding-event action that is defined in the plugin

For example the following code could be placed in your functions.php and would store the description, start time and end time of the event as metadata on the post.

use Outlandish\CalendarEventSync\CalendarEventSyncPlugin;
use Outlandish\CalendarEventSync\Models\ExternalEvent;

add_action(CalendarEventSyncPlugin::STORE_EVENT_ACTION, function (ExternalEvent $event) {
    if ($event->savedToWordPress()) {
        add_post_meta($event->getPostId(), 'event_description', $event->getDescription());
        add_post_meta($event->getPostId(), 'event_start', $event->getStartTime()->getTimestamp());
        add_post_meta($event->getPostId(), 'event_end', $event->getEndTime()->getTimestamp());
    }
}, 20);

Or if you are using ACF and have defined some custom fields of your own

use Outlandish\CalendarEventSync\CalendarEventSyncPlugin;
use Outlandish\CalendarEventSync\Models\ExternalEvent;

add_action(CalendarEventSyncPlugin::STORE_EVENT_ACTION, function (ExternalEvent $event) {
    if ($event->savedToWordPress()) {
        update_field('event_description', $event->getDescription(), $event->getPostId());
        update_field('event_start', $event->getStartTime()->getTimestamp(), $event->getPostId());
        update_field('event_end', $event->getEndTime()->getTimestamp(), $event->getPostId());
    }
}, 20);

The timing for when your action is run (in our example this is set to 20), is very important. The saving of the WordPress post is run at 10, so if you set your action hook to run at 10 or less, you will be acting on the ExternalEvent before it has been turned into a WordPress post and won't be able to save any metadata about the event.

Replacing the default behaviour

You might not like the way that the Google Calendar Event is stored, and you can use the remove_action method to remove the default behaviour and replace it with your own.

By default the WordPress post is created at time 10, and then later updated to be published at time 50.

To stop Events from being published by default you can use the following code snippet

remove_action(
    CalendarEventSyncPlugin::STORE_EVENT_ACTION, 
    [CalendarEventSyncPlugin::class, 'publishEvent'], 
    50
);

Note that when doing this, you need to specify the same timing (the third argument to the function) as was specified when the action you are removing was added. This will now stop events from being published after they are created. You could then replace this behaviour with some other logic about what events get automatically published and which ones don't.

To stop Events from being saved altogether, so that you can save them with a different post_type (for example), you will want to run the following snippet

remove_action(
    CalendarEventSyncPlugin::STORE_EVENT_ACTION, 
    [CalendarEventSyncPlugin::class, 'defaultStoreStrategy'], 
    10
);

You can then define your own storage strategy like so

use Outlandish\CalendarEventSync\CalendarEventSyncPlugin;
use Outlandish\CalendarEventSync\Models\ExternalEvent;

add_action(CalendarEventSyncPlugin::STORE_EVENT_ACTION, function (ExternalEvent $event) {

    if ($event->getSummary() === 'Only store this event') { //only store the event if this is true

        $id = wp_insert_post([
            'post_title' => $event->getSummary(),
            'post_type' => 'calendar_event', // a custom post_type here
            'post_status' => 'draft',
            'post_name' => $event->getId()
        ]);

        add_post_meta($id, 'event_description', $event->getDescription());
        add_post_meta($id, 'event_start', $event->getStartTime()->getTimestamp());
        add_post_meta($id, 'event_end', $event->getEndTime()->getTimestamp());

        //always do this code
        add_post_meta($id, CalendarEventSyncPlugin::EXTERNAL_EVENT_ID_KEY, $event->getId());
        $event->setPostId($id);
    }

}, 10);

Testing

Tests have been written with the use of humanmade/plugin-tester docker image in mind.

To run the project's tests run composer install to install the plugin's dependencies, and then run

docker run --rm -v "$PWD:/code" humanmade/plugin-tester --testsuite=Unit

This will run all tests defined in the Unit testsuite and output the results.

This plugin expects pconv to be installed when running the tests for code coverage results. If you do not have this installed on your local version of php, you can run composer install --ignore-platform-reqs to install required packages without needing for pcov to be installed.

Test Coverage

When you run the tests you will also produce an HTML report that will appear in reports/coverage which will provide you with information about the code that is covered by the tests.