I use All-in-One Event Calendar by Timely to display a calendar on my personal website. My work patters demand people are able to see when I’m free and more traditional methods of calendar sharing (like Outlook) aren’t suitable as I’m dealing with people on multiple platforms, devices, ages and demographics. Having it publicly available on the web has been the easiest solution in many ways. More after the break….

So far All-in-One Event Calendar is the most attractive yet still functional calendar I can find for WordPress. Many other calendar plugins are functional, but boy are they ugly. While it could use a few visual tweaks, Timely’s calendar does the trick for me.

There was however, one big issue I had after initial installation. It didn’t update my calendar and wouldn’t display any data. Rather a problem.

A quick overview of my setup: I use a Google Calendar which I access mostly through iCal on my macs and iOS devices. It generally works well and allows more flexibility when it comes to sharing than Apple’s iCloud does (although I use that for other things).

Timely is meant to be able to read the public feed from Google calendar. Only on my calendar it didn’t work. I tried reinstalling several times which didn’t fix the problem. I tried all kinds of hacks to various bits of code that I found in various forums across the internet. Those didn’t work either. It turns out the problem was my calendar was just too big.

The progress circle would spin after I hit update, but it would continue to spin, and spin, and spin and spin some more. Even after a day it hadn’t updated. It didn’t error, but it didn’t load either. The solution was to create a new Google Calendar (in the same account) and start fresh. This did the trick and it has been working reliably for about 6 months now. Yes it was a pain to transfer future calendar events over, but it only took a couple of hours in the end.

All-in-One Event Calendar updating

All-in-One Event Calendar with the update spinning wheel

Now I do admit that I have a pretty in-depth calendar due to my work patterns, and it did have several years of content built up, but it would have been handy if there was an error message telling me this was the problem rather than spending days trying to work it out.

I have left my “old” calendar hidden away in Google Calendar just in case I need to reference it, but all new content seems to happily embed in All-in-One Event Calendar.

This is a very esoteric problem I’m sure, but hopefully this post might save some poor soul hours of messing around with hacks and plugins.