Events Integration Plugin (Beta)

plugin
#1

This plugin is in open beta. It will be officially launched in November 2022 along with subscriptions (free for communities, plans for businesses).
:information_source: Summary Integrate events into Discourse
:hammer_and_wrench: Repository Link GitHub - paviliondev/discourse-events-integration: Integrate events into your Discourse forum
:open_book: Install Guide How to install plugins in Discourse

What does it do?

The Discourse Events Integration Plugin (DEIP) lets you integrate calendars, event discovery, event ticketing, event management and events from social network events Discourse. It currently supports the following service providers

Provider Type Notes
iCalendar Calendar Client e.g. Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar
Eventbrite Event Discovery
Meetup Event Groups Requires Meetup Pro
Humanitix Event Ticketing
Eventzilla Event Management

Any other calendaring, event discovery, event ticketing, event management or social network can be integrated. Please reach out to product@pavilion.tech for details.

How does it work?

The DEIP works with the event service providers you’re already using. When you create events in a provider like Google Calendar, Eventbrite or Meetup, the DEIP lets you automatically integrate those events into your Discourse community. That means you can schedule in your calendar, run ticketing in Eventbrite, publicise on Meetup.com and discuss on your Discourse.

Here’s a little intro to the functionality I’ve made for the beta

Learn more about getting started with the DEIP here

And read more about the plugin in the documentation

  1. Add a Provider
  2. Add a Source
  3. Add a Connection
  4. Automation and Management

Research and Development

The DEIP is the product of an EU-funded research project conducted by Pavilion, and is part of a wider project to develop a modern event data portability standard. Read more about the project here

16 Likes
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#2

A few updates here

  1. This plugin will be merged into the Events Plugin for it’s final release.

  2. We’ll be applying the same subscription model (free for communities, plans for businesses) used for the Custom Wizard Plugin to the unified Events Plugin.

  3. I’m giving an overview of the event data model we developed as part of the research behind this plugin at the CalConnect conference in Nottingham (UK), next week. The main folks involved in the development of calendaring standards at the IETF will be there, so it should be interesting :slight_smile:

10 Likes
#3

That sounds fantastic. Will you post a note here/ somewhere once the combined plugin is released?

#4

Yes :slight_smile:

@RGJ is Pavilion’s product lead on the release of v2 of the Events Plugin which will include this plugin and a number of other improvements.

We actually (just today) got our final report card from the EU’s DAPSI program for our work on this plugin.

Criterion 1 – Business Evaluation Score (0,00 – 20,00) 17
Criterion 2 - Technical Evaluation Score (0,00 – 50,00) 40
Criterion 3 – Assistance Trainings Score (0,00 – 10,00) 10
Criterion 4 – Participation in Final Event Score (0,00-20,00) 20
TOTAL Score (0,00-100,00) 87

Needless to say, we’re pretty excited about launching v2 of the Events Plugin with all of this work included!

10 Likes
#5

Still hoping for November 2022 release :innocent:

1 Like
#6

Hey @Nick_Tomlinson please reach out to us here

2 Likes
#7

Hey Angus, I filled in the Wizard form at coop.pavilion.tech/w/discourse-events-integration-early-access last week. But nothing happened subsequently.

Was I meant to get access to something?

I’d really like to discuss stuff about how events might work as I’ve got a pretty solid use-case that I fear will fall outside the current scope.

1 Like
#8

Hey @nathankershaw,

There was a bug on the form which we’ve since fixed. Sorry about that!

If you fill it out again we’ll get back to you. Excited to hear about your use case.

2 Likes
#9

I’m afraid that I’m getting this when I try to redo the form:

image
image1038×208 11.5 KB

1 Like
#10

Oops. Fixed. Try again.

3 Likes
#11

Thanks again Pavilion team,
I find it not so obvious to connect to an iCal provider that is nor google and outlook (in my case, our own nextcloud). Documentation seems to be truncated on paragraph iCalendar

iCalendar providers don’t require any authentication, so you can just add one by selecting “icalendar”, giving it a name and saving the provider. If you’re integrating multiple

Were there more instructions ?

I don’t understand why the link providing the ics file ( http://[DOMAIN-NAME]/remote.php/dav/calendars/[USER]/[CALENDAR-URI]/?export [e.g.]) does not work ( Finished importing from ***. Retrieved 0 events, created 0 events and updated 0 events.)

Thanks in advance

#12

Can the plugin be integrated with mobilizon’s free federated platform?
https://docs.joinmobilizon.org/contribute/integrations/

2 Likes
#13

That would be awesome!

#14

I’ll be giving some more updates and guidance on this plugin next week.

I attempted to integrate with Mobilizon as part of the project. See here

For a window into this issue it’s worth consider the disposition toward event management in Disapora and Mastodon, the lack of adoption of these open source Meetup.com alternatives, or the fact that the Mobilizon documentation website was intermittently offline throughout the period of the research, most of their support forum is in French and that they have the only API on the list that uses basic authentication to obtain an access token. We say this not to criticise the developers of any of these services (as developers of open source software ourselves, we’re acutely aware of the challenges involved in such projects), but we want to be clear-eyed about the current situation.

Given time constraints I decided to focus on the more documented / stable alternatives. I’ll attempt to integrate Mobilizon again in the future.

4 Likes