Steady Calendar

A WordPress plugin that shows Google Calendar or any iCal / ICS / webcal link on your site. It can also show only your free time for bookings. The connection is built to stay up, and you get an e-mail when it doesn't.

It is meant as a more reliable, better-looking alternative to Simple Calendar and similar plugins.

Features

Sources

• Calendar links work without any Google setup. That covers Outlook, Apple iCloud, Airbnb, Booking.com, Teamup, public holiday feeds and anything else that publishes iCal.
• Google Calendar can be connected with your own OAuth client. Access is read-only. Changes arrive almost instantly through push notifications, with a sync every 15 minutes as a fallback.
• Several calendars can be merged into one view. Each keeps its own colour, and the legend has on/off toggles.
• A full RFC 5545 parser handles:
  • recurring events: RRULE, EXDATE, RDATE and RECURRENCE-ID overrides;
  • time zones, including Windows and Outlook names;
  • VTIMEZONE and X-WR-TIMEZONE;
  • Outlook "free" status.

Privacy

• Each calendar can be set to show events, show only "Busy", or be hidden. A hidden calendar still blocks free slots.
• Calendar addresses never appear in the page.
• Secrets and tokens are encrypted at rest with libsodium.

Display

• Gutenberg block Steady Calendar and the [steady_calendar] shortcode.
• Views:
  • month, week, day and list views, with a switcher;
  • list view on phones;
  • clicking a date opens that day.
• The time grid can be limited to working hours, for example 10:00–18:00 in 2-hour rows. Rows are labelled as ranges.
• The calendar adapts to its container width instead of the screen width.
• Out of the box it takes fonts and colours from the theme. Detailed styling options exist site-wide, per block, or as shortcode attributes, plus custom CSS.
• An event dialog with "Add to my Google Calendar".
• Events can be renamed per calendar. For example, a holiday feed can be translated for one language version of the site.

Bookings

• A free-slots view shows visitors when you are free, but never your events.
• Requests come in by e-mail, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram or your own booking link, with the date and time already filled in.

Reliability

• An e-mail alert is sent when the calendar stops updating, and another when it works again. It covers a lost Google connection, a failing link, or stopped WP-Cron.
• The admin page shows a clear connection status and explains errors in plain language.

Performance and SEO

• Scripts load only when the calendar scrolls into view.
• Events are cached locally, so the site doesn't call Google on every page view.
• Schema.org Event markup is added for search results.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.4 or later
• PHP 7.4 or later, with the sodium extension, which is standard since PHP 7.2

Installation

1. Download this repository as a ZIP. The folder inside must be named steady-calendar.
2. In WordPress, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin and upload the ZIP.
3. Open Steady Calendar in the admin menu. Either paste an iCal link, or connect a Google account.
4. Add the Steady Calendar block to a page, or use the shortcode:

[steady_calendar]

Translations

The plugin ships with English, German, Hungarian, Russian and Ukrainian. On multilingual sites, such as ones using Polylang, each language version of a page can show its own calendar.

External services

• Google OAuth and the Calendar API are used only if you connect a Google account.
• The iCal links you add are downloaded from the servers they point to.
• No external scripts or fonts are loaded on the front end.

See readme.txt for details.

Credits

• FullCalendar is bundled under the MIT licence in assets/vendor/fullcalendar.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.