DISQUS

Jesse · 1 year ago

Hey, thanks for the great article and attention to this ever frustrating problem! :D

As I am s bit new to PHP, etc.. and have dry feet when it comes to Python.. can you give me a step by step on how to set this up to simply create 1 'dump' of the SMF calendar data to be imported into Google Calendar??

Thanks again!!
I know a lot of others that I'll be directing here as well.. they need this info!
J

ryan · 1 year ago

Hi Jesse,

I'm assuming you've got Python installed. If not check out the Python Beginners Guide.

Once you've got the script downloaded, on the command line you'd type something like this:

python /path/to/smf_ical_converter.py -u http://nhunderground.com/forum/index.php -n "NH Underground" -i "Birthdays:" -o /path/to/nh-underground.ics

The /path/to/ parts in there would simply be a directory of your choosing.

The -i "Birthdays:" part tells the application to ignore any calendar entry with the text "Birthdays:" in it. In this case I didn't want all the NHFree birthdays showing up on my google calendar.

the -n "NH Underground" part is simply a name that I gave to the calendar and is the name that the calendar imports as inside google.

Let me know how it works out for you and what you're using it for, I'm glad its of use to people out there.

-Ryan

ryan · 1 year ago

Hi again Jesse,

I uploaded version 2 of the script, it has a better README in it. I didn't realize how bad the first one was. (it was more of a note to myself than a README)

Thanks for dropping by,

Ryan

Gavin · 1 year ago

hi there Ryan, I am very glad to read this post. I was just today putting together a nationwide calender (in Google Calendar of course) or anarchist meetups and events. And high on my list is NHU and FSP... of course I have the same problem with lack of iCal as you :-/ I'm going to give this script a go. A couple questions: First, is there anyway you can be a middle man until FSP and NHU have iCal enabled sites? I mean, could you share a calendar that I could add to my own calendar? Second, if you don't want to do that, a question about the script. Do I need to clear my calender before I re-import (say once a month), I mean, will re-importing the .ics files create dupe entries?

ryan · 1 year ago

Hi Gavin,

At the bottom of the post is an ical file for NHU. Unless there is some sort of problem, those files are updated every 2 hours.

I import those into google calendar (by URL, not by uploading) and google automatically captures the updated ics file every so often. How often that is, I have no idea.

Feel free to use the ics files above whenever you need them. I can't guarantee they will always work, but I'll do my best.

By the way, I don't have any ics file for the FSP because they have their own ical file that they host here: http://www.freestateproject.org/event/ical/all/all

Gavin · 1 year ago

great!

ryan · 1 year ago

Hi CJ,

This was written for Python 2.5.. it looks like you're trying to run it with 3.0 which broke a lot of things.

CJ · 1 year ago

Actually, I was using 2.6.1, which I thought was compatible. To be sure, I compiled a clean copy of 2.5.2, and gave that a whirl:

$ /opt/python/2.5.2/bin/python -V
Python 2.5.2
$ /opt/python/2.5.2/bin/python smf_ical_converter.py -u "http://uerth.com/index.php" -o test.ics
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "smf_ical_converter.py", line 153, in
parser.save(options.output_file)
File "smf_ical_converter.py", line 97, in save
self.parse()
File "smf_ical_converter.py", line 68, in parse
for box in soup.find("div", id="bodyarea").findAll("td",{"class":re.compile("(windowbg)|(calendar_today)")}):
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'findAll'


Still no love. If it helps, I'm running a current version of ArchLinux, and I have no Python related environment variables set.

Any ideas?

scrax · 11 months ago

I've forgotted to tell you that I'm on mac osx 10.5.6 with the 2.5.1 Python distribution pre-installed.

ryan · 11 months ago

I'm realizing that this script was more of a one-shot. It doesn't do much error handling at all and because it's a web scraper it's not really supportable across the myriad ways that people could have customized SMF.

Sorry guys, I just don't have the time to help people with this script.

scrax · 11 months ago

Thank's anyway ryan. The forum that give me problems is mine so maybe I can try to change back to the original smf installation without the joomla integration, if i have succes i'll post here for everybody.

I'm on a mac and i use cronnix to execute the script every night, and Dropbox helps me in uploading the .ics file automatically.

Sergio · 6 months ago

Thnks for your app.

wooow!