About this plugin
Bezugssysteme ICS Feed lets you pull in external calendar feeds (Google Calendar, Apple iCloud, Outlook, Nextcloud, club/community software, and any other RFC 5545-compliant ICS source) and display them as clean, accessible, fully customizable event cards on your WordPress site.
Feeds are managed as their own content type, synced with one click, cached locally for fast page loads, and displayed wherever you need them: a native Gutenberg block, a flexible shortcode, or a classic sidebar widget.
Key Features
- Native Gutenberg block with a real server-side live preview in the editor, plus full InspectorControls for layout, sorting, and design.
- Recurring events (RRULE): daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly recurrence rules are automatically expanded into individual occurrences, including BYDAY, BYMONTHDAY, BYMONTH, INTERVAL, COUNT, UNTIL, and EXDATE. Timezone- and DST-safe.
- Combine multiple calendars in a single view: pass a comma-separated list of feed IDs to merge feeds, each visually distinguished with its own accent color, source badge, and dedicated quick filter.
- Three tile design presets (Classic, Minimal/Flat, Accent Header) with granular control over colors, shadows, padding, border radius, and optional inheritance of your active theme’s colors.
- Teaser vs. detail field control: decide, per RFC 5545 field, whether it appears immediately in the card or only after clicking “Read more” (accordion or dedicated single-event page).
- CSV export: a one-click, Excel-compatible CSV download of the currently displayed events (semicolon-separated with UTF-8 BOM for correct handling of accented characters).
- Add to Calendar: one-click export of any event to Google Calendar, Outlook Web, or as an Apple/ICS download.
- Client-side search and category filtering, no page reload required.
- Resilient local caching: the frontend never makes a live request to the external feed. If the source is temporarily unreachable, the existing cached events are kept.
- Automatic background sync via WP-Cron (hourly, twice daily, or daily per feed), with a built-in status panel and setup guidance for a real server cron job.
- Schema.org Event structured data (JSON-LD) for Google Rich Snippets, without touching <head>.
- Accessibility: WAI-ARIA roles and states throughout (tabs, accordion, dialogs), screen-reader labels, visible focus states, and a dedicated print stylesheet.
- Classic sidebar widget for themes or widget areas without block-widget support.
- No external runtime dependencies: no jQuery on the frontend, no bundled frameworks — vanilla CSS Grid and vanilla JavaScript.
Security
- Feed URLs are fetched with wp_safe_remote_get(), which blocks requests to internal/private IP ranges at the WordPress core level.
- All state-changing actions are nonce-protected; feed management requires a dedicated capability limited to Administrators and Editors by default.
- Feed descriptions are rendered as plain text, not HTML, to avoid content injection from a feed source you don’t fully control.
- The CSV export endpoint’s download link is nonce-bound to the specific feed combination, preventing blind enumeration of feed IDs that aren’t embedded anywhere on your site.
Privacy
This plugin does not send any data to the plugin author or to any third-party service operated by the author. It does not use tracking, analytics, or telemetry of any kind.
The only outbound network request the plugin makes is to the calendar feed URL that you, the site administrator, configure for each feed — this request is made directly from your own WordPress server to that URL, exactly once per manual sync and, if enabled, on the schedule you choose (hourly, twice daily, or daily). , Google Calendar, Apple iCloud, Outlook), not on this plugin.
) is cached in your own WordPress database and displayed on your site; it is never transmitted anywhere else by this plugin. The optional CSV export feature generates a file on the fly from that same cached data and sends it directly to the visitor’s browser — it is not stored anywhere or transmitted to a third party.