Wikevent:News 2007 5 16

I'm very pleased to announce the release of a new feature: the iCalendar uploader extension.

Using the extension you can upload an iCalendar file containing events which are specific to a single artist or venue, or even a mixed calendar if you prefer. The system will find the right page(s) to put the event on, so you don't have to worry about where to put them.

In order to make this possible a number of other improvements were necessary:

• Improved Crossreferencing - The Event extension now knows how to place single events on the correct page. It no longer just makes a redirect. Crossreferenced events should be automatically updated whenever the event to which they are crossreferenced is updated.
• Fuzzy venue names - You can now use just about any text about a venue in the "where" attribute. The Venue code will try to figure out which venue you mean. If more than one matching venue is found the Event will be rendered with a little form allowing you to choose the correct venue, or maybe enter a new one.
• Concrete Venue Names - Actually we've had this one for a while. You can now use "locality" and "venue" to precicely specify a venue, rather than relying on the new fuzzyness of the venue search when you do know the exact name and location of your venue.

So, hopefully we have one less barrier now to uptake with venues and artists. Now publishing your events everywhere is as easy as submitting an iCalendar file to this website.

Next on the list: More automatic interpretation of plain text event information, so that we can just grab events from artist and venue websites. This of course is the big one.