How to make iCalendar subscriptions on websites cross-platform?

Question

The company I work for offers a custom, hosted CMS. We have a calendar tool that allows clients to track events in the system.

A while back, I implemented iCalendar feeds into this tool. It works great, except for when it comes to users "subscribing" to the feed.

What we are seeing is that for many people, they are getting simply a ".ics" file that they are then importing into their calendar app. When this happens, it is a one-time action and people are not getting updates to the calendar or the events (which is a big problem).

We have tried some things in the past (like using a "webcal://" URL, but we got mixed results on that) but were not able to find a solution that was consistent across different devices (desktops, tablets, phones) or browsers.

This is becoming a huge problem for us as clients are starting to complain about people not getting up-to-date feeds.

Is there a "standard" way to provide an actual "subscribe" link to these feeds? Or, is there some kind of iCal property (maybe not a "standard" property in regards to the RFC, but widely accepted in calendar programs) that would make these different applications behave the way we need them to when a feed is imported?

If there isn't a solution for this, we might just have to link out to some documentation describing how to subscribe to feeds in the different platforms. I'd like to avoid this as it would be a huge pain to be thorough and to keep updated...

Answer 1

Using 'webcal://' is the standard-ish way to do this. Not an official standard, but it's the most widely used.

If you're on a system where no application picks up on that protocol, webcal:// will simply not work at all.

The only solution is to then provide specific instructions for those setups that don't have support for this.