Calendaring

Something I have been looking into for quite some time now is how to effectively share calendars where a person can publish from a calendar client (as opposed to using a website to add events).

For work and personal sites I use DreamHost, and while they give me lots of options to publish or subscribe to calendars, I haven’t found a way to do both for the same calendar on the virtual hosting.

For my personal calendar where I post social events I am attending I use WebDAV to publish using Lightning/Thunderbird. Then I use phpicalendar to show them online. However, one can not subscribe to those through phpicalendar, that isn’t what it is for. And I can’t let them access the calendar through WebDAV without giving full access, due to the way DreamHost provides it. That works fine for me personally, though sharing events requires someone going to a website.

WebCalendar is a pretty nifty piece of software, and it works really well. Just one installation and I can set up multiple users with their own calendars. They each have their own URI for subscribing, so sharing the calendars with others is simple, and that makes it useful for my work situation, where four people are essentially telecommuting and need to keep their schedules somewhat in sync. However, the publishing function requires the use of a script on the server, which is turn requires an Apache configuration change, and I can’t figure out how to do that in a virtual hosting environment. The software is easy enough to use by interfacing with the website, but still, that kinda sucks.

The thing I have figured out how to do is subscribing and publishing to Google Calendar with iCal.app and Lightning/Thunderbird, using CalDAV. Google starting supporting this not long ago, and while it is a little buggy (the clients seem to crash when I was messing around with settings), it fulfills my task. I don’t want to use a company to host our calendars like that, but it seems to work well with our budget (is it appropriate to mention we are in a recession? ^_^).

I would love any ideas or suggestions on software or setups where multiple folks are using calendars in a business environment. Share them in the comments, please.