Mozilla Calendar and shareable calendars across multiple clients using http

In this guide I will establish a way to host your calendar-files on some server and access it through http. This will enable you to use the excellent Mozilla Calendar app to manage your calendar. Beside Mozilla Calendar you will need PHPiCalendar.

I guess there is nothing fancy about this but in case you need inspiration on how to get it going here is a smallish guide.

First, Mozilla Calendar. It is a great calendar-app, although it has not reached v1 yet. I usually grab the latest nightly of Lightning, the Thunderbird addon, but Sunbird works well too.

There are fancy protocols like CalDAV or WebDAV to handle calendar content but this is not always an option. Thus, we will a a smart way to access the calendar-files. Luckily, PHPiCalendar provides just that. You can install PHPiCalendar pretty much everywhere, since it only requires PHP.

PHPiCalendar has a fancy script called publish.php that can be used to write to calendar files through http. I can be a bit dificult to set up PHPiCalendar, but it can be done. It is important that you enable the /phpicalendar/calendars/ for write access.


Now you can add some calendars to Mozilla. You need to add a new calendar and chose a network calendar. Chose ics calendar. The url needs to be something like this: youdomain.com/phpicalendar/calendars/publish.php/YouCalendar.ics

Everything should be pretty smooth from here. You might need to upload an empty calendar youself. . .

Of course, you can access you calendar in a web interface as well.

Now, if you want to be a bit fancy you can have Google sent an sms messaged each time you have something planed. If you go to the google calendar you can subscribe to your ics file and tell google to hit you with a sms, say 30 minuttes before every event.