Introduction
On this page we'll discuss the options available for publishing our
FileMaker calendar templates to the web. If you have additional questions,
please don't hesitate to contact
us, or to post a question to our calendar support
forum.
Hosting
A number of the options below require FileMaker Server Advanced.
You'll need this to subscribe to the calendar from iCal or to subscribe
to calendar activity over RSS. You'll also need FileMaker Server Advanced
if you want to serve our Instant Web Publishing (IWP) Module to more
than 5 simultaneous web users.
If you don't have your own copy of FileMaker Server Advanced, you
can take advantage of 3rd party hosting. A hosting company will set
up the server and take care of it for you, installing updates, scheduling
backups, and hosting your files there where you an access them using
FileMaker client or a web browser.
We
use Adatasol
for our own hosting. Dan Weiss at Adatasol is a real expert at hosting
and at IWP. Adatasol was a beta site for our IWP calendar: they do
great work.
(Improved for FM8) Instant Web Publishing
How it works. The Instant
Web Publishing Module (IWP Module) for our Calendar allows you
to use FileMaker's built in IWP engine to publish an interactive calendar
to the web using an almost identical interface to the desktop version
of SeedCode Calendar. Users can create, edit and delete appointments,
contacts, and projects using a web browser.
The module is a second interface
file for the Calendar and doesn't contain any data or information
about your appointments: it makes use of the appointments file you're
already using with SeedCode Calendar Pro. You simply place the IWP
module beside your other calendar files and serve it as you do the
others... more about that below. You'll need to turn on instant web
publishing for your existing Calendar files, but that's it. (Instructions
for turning this on are provided in the documentation which comes
with the IWP module.)
Demo. Check out a live demo of our IWP Module here Calendar IWP Demo.
Requirements. CC Calendar Pro for FileMaker 7/8, or SeedCode
Calendar Pro for FileMaker 8. To serve the calendar you'll need FileMaker
Server Advanced which provides for up to 100 simultaneous web
connections: if your server hardware will handle that. (Note that
you can upgrade to Server Advanced from Server here.
If you don't want to use FileMaker Pro Server, you can use the Instant
Web Publishing capabilities of the desktop version of FileMaker Pro
to serve the calendar to up to 5 simultaneous users.
Hardware requirements...
For FileMaker
Server Advanced.
For hosting
with FileMaker Pro 7 (desktop version).
Web Publishing Read-Only Calendars: Using iCal
How it works. The Pro Version of SeedCode Calendar provides
for the ability to export a found set of appointments in the vcal
format which can then be imported into Apple's iCal. This feature
has been available in the Pro Calendar since the FileMaker 6 versions
of the calendar. If you have a .Mac
account or another
way of sharing your ical files, you can export appointments in
this way and publish read-only calendars from your FileMaker data.
If you're using iSync, you can even sync these new iCal calendars
with your cell phone or pda, though at this time we don't have any
way for you to get changes made to your appointments while they're
on your phone back into FileMaker. The sync is kind of a one-way thing.
The iCal export has been improved in the FileMaker 7/8 version of
the Calendar so that it is a two click affair to move from a month
of appointments to exporting them. Simply click "Search" on any calendar
screen and you'll see export buttons at the bottom of the next screen.
One nice thing about this is that each found set you export from
the Calendar becomes its own "calendar" in iCal, so you can kind of
filter iCal as you filter SeedCode Calendar, providing you export
each appointment type as its own found set. You can see an example
of such an export here.
If you are frequently exporting several found sets, you may wish to
automate this using the ScriptFire
Plugin to export the files every x hours.
Requirements. CC Calendar Pro (for FileMaker 6 or 7/8), or
SeedCode Calendar Pro (for FileMaker 8), Apple's iCal and a .Mac account
or another way of sharing your iCal files.
(New) Web Publishing
Read-Only Calendars: Subscribe to FileMaker from iCal
How it works. With a couple simple modifications to SeedCode
Calendar you can subscribe to the calendar from iCal using FileMaker
Server Advanced. This is a *very* cool trick. Everything you need
is right here.
Requirements. CC Calendar Pro, Pro SE for FileMaker 7/8, or
SeedCode Calendar for FileMaker 8, and FileMaker Server Advanced with
Custom Web Publishing enabled. Client's can subscribe from iCal (Mac)
or Sunbird (Windows).
(New) Web Publishing Read-Only Calendars: Subscribe to FileMaker via RSS
How it works. SeedCode Calendar comes with built in RSS support
that lets you subscribe to project activity via RSS. The RSS urls
support all the calendar filters so you can subscribe to "my projects'
activity" or "late projects' activity" or "my team's activity". You
can find more information about this, including a live demo, in the RSS
section of our documentation.
Demo. Check out a live demo here FileMaker RSS Feed Demo.
Requirements. SeedCode Calendar for FileMaker 8, and FileMaker
Server Advanced with Custom Web Publishing enabled.
Web Publishing Read-Only Calendars: Using PHPiCalendar
How it works. PHPiCalendar
is a powerful, free, opensource alternative to iCal. Among its advantages
is that you can run PHPiCalendar on most web servers and don't need
a .mac account as you do with iCal. PHPiCalendar reads vcal files
just like iCal does, so you can use the iCal export in SeedCode Calendar
Pro to create files for PHPiCalendar. Like iCal, PHPiCalendar is a
read-only publishing option and, like iCal, it takes each vcal file
as its own "calendar" so you can set up filtering in the same way
as we described above for Apple's iCal. This is definitely one of our favorite ways
to web publish read only calendars. In addition to automating your
exports as described above, you can use one of the ftp
plugins to script the delivery of your vcal files to your web
server- for truly seamless automation.
Demo. You can see a demo
PHPiCalendar on our site, on the main
PHPiCalendar site, or on the phpical
sourceforge site.
Requirements. CC Calendar Pro (for FileMaker 6 or 7/8) or
SeedCode Calendar (for FileMaker 8 or 9), a web server running PHPiCalendar,
and FTP access to the calendar directory on that server.
