As this request from our community appeared again, I would like to link this older feature request which was not located in the correct category:
Calendar: export to caldav/carddav](Calendar: export to caldav/carddav)
While ical export is file based, caldav would require a dav service with appropriate API calls. The ical export option would be easier, I assume …
caldav subscription is a basic of any event management extension, where could we start a fundraising for this feature?
Absolutely true.
From my point of view the current implementation of calendar functionality is only useful for use cases, where all time management is prepared inside of Discourse and/or with some proprietary solutions like the Gmail calendar. This makes it somehow “isolated” as there is no integration with other open systems.
In many cases people use external calendar solutions which are independent from a specific provider (e.g. Radicale caldav/carddav server in python). They simply want to display the calendar inside of the forum (“read only”) and sync with external changes automatically.
If discourse could act as a caldav client (like thunderbird on the desktop and DAVx⁵ on android), this would be a big step. At first it could be “read only”, second step would be the implementation of write permissions to external caldav calendars. This should be linked to the user profile which is a different approach as the current calendar plugin.
Caldav is more practical indeed for a community and is also a lot of work as as you mention it, it needs to act as a server for a 2 way sync.
On the other hand a Webcal feed is just a one way collection and broadcast of data which would be way easier and faster to implement.
I understand the need for caldav but it may delay the implementation of the more quickly feasible feature that webcal is.