Custom Discourse instance for a writers club

I manage JoesWriters.Club and as of now am the only developer.
I’m looking for an experienced discourse developer and someone who is organized in development cycles to help keep our project on track. Initially, any tips you could give in reply to this topic would be helpful. We are willing to hire the right candidate on an hourly basis with your minimum retainer required just to help me develop a long-term plan and provide guidance on best practices in pushing updates. I’m pretty disorganized just going straight into the server making changes or in the customization console. I’m not saving a git repository or docker image. I could probably get these things together on my own but I just want a smart developer to help keep me accountable.

I’m beginning to worry I might do something that will upset our members as well. For instance, I recently added the calendar plugin and the events plugin below:

I found when importing the iCal to google calendar only publically viewable events are showing. I considered whether it was because the google auth didn’t originally ask permission for google calendar API and added that to our google developer permissions. The real point is, even though I’ll figure out a solution eventually I’m worried some of our members may be using the calendar in their private rooms and I don’t want them to lose track of anything important if I make a major change.

We have plans for other integrations and customizations and guidance in designing a feasible timeline would be appreciated and compensated.

In the long-term, we are hoping to work with a developer who may be interested in joining our writing community and perhaps become a partner in our club. We are a small club and don’t have a very large budget for the ongoing development and would require someone skilled that would help us for a minimum base pay plus partnership interest.

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Hi @T.C_MacNevin

If this project isn’t excessively time sensitive then I am interested in your project. I’m more of a consultant than a developer but have a good understanding of discourse and integrating other services to discourse.

I’d like to understand your requirements better. Feel free to write an email to bhanu@orng.co and can discuss.

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Thanks @itsbhanusharma

I sent you an email with broad details of what we would like to achieve. Essentially I’d like to begin with someone who can help us organize to prevent any huge mistakes. If you could recommend any additional developers as we go that would also be appreciated.

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Regarding importing a calendar subscription into google calendar, it seems that private category events won’t show up:

I’d like to implement this feature at some point and I see any restricted category displays a link to generate iCal API keys. I’ll probably be investigating this and I wouldn’t be too worried about adding this to our own site but it horrifies me to think that if I come up with anything useful I might issue a PR to the main branch. I’m sure if it gets to that point plenty of knowledgeable people will have reviewed it.

Has anyone seen an existing solution to integrating iCal API from discourse events with google calendar directly?
I’ve also seen posts about google calendar onebox but some people say it doesn’t work for them and in addition, that means login with google is required to use the calendar.

I don’t want to make this thread all about calendars but I wanted to clarify as much as I know in case anyone comes across this topic.

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I got the private events to import into google calendar and iOS by adding the generated API key, thank you. I noticed that adding a specific category calendar actually adds all events from every category I belong to. So for now I created a new user for each category with access to only that category. Then generate a separate key for each. Thinking about implementing this programmatically.

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