Description
SDAweb Calendar Sync turns any Google Calendar into a polished, on-brand events display on your WordPress site — without duplicate data entry. Keep scheduling in Google Calendar the way you already do; the plugin pulls those events in and keeps your site in sync automatically.
It’s for anyone who already runs their events in Google Calendar and wants them to look like a native part of their site instead of an embedded iframe — businesses, teams, venues, clubs, communities, and organisations of every kind.
Insert a calendar with a Gutenberg block, a shortcode, or a classic widget. All three share one render pipeline, so the output is identical however you add it.
Six ways to show your calendar
- List / Agenda — chronological, optionally grouped by day, week, or month
- Month grid — classic 7×6 calendar with multi-day event ribbons spanning across cells, today highlight (cell or whole-column style), optional ISO 8601 week-number column, and per-feed pastel chips
- Card grid — upcoming events as styled cards, responsive
- Week — 7 day columns, today highlighted
- Day — single-day agenda
- Mini-month — compact dot-density grid for sidebars and widgets, with a tap-to-expand event panel showing today + next upcoming events and a “Load more” button
Switch between views with one setting, or expose a visitor-facing view-toggle pill so visitors can switch themselves. Under the hood every view shares the same data layer, the same CSS-variable system, and the same accessibility baseline.
Smart UX out of the box
- Hover popover on event chips (Month, Week, Mini) — a floating card with date, time, location, calendar, recurrence summary, and a click-through link, so visitors get the full event detail without leaving the page. Desktop hover + keyboard focus only; touch users keep direct click-through.
- Mobile auto-degrade Month Mini — below ~600px the full grid is replaced by the compact Mini-month view, so phone visitors get a clean, tappable calendar with no extra work from you. One wrapper, two layouts, no JS swap.
- ICS subscribe dropdown — one tap to add your events to a visitor’s own calendar: Google Calendar (web), Apple Calendar / Outlook (webcal), Android Google Calendar app (intent), and Copy-link with toast confirmation. Mobile becomes a bottom sheet.
- Live search + jump-to-date picker — optional chrome controls so visitors can filter or navigate quickly.
- Multi-day event ribbons — week-spanning bars with arrow indicators when an event continues beyond the visible row.
- Recurring event indicator — small ↻ icon with a plain-language cadence summary in the tooltip (“Repeats weekly until 31 December 2026”).
- Per-display locale override — render a calendar in a specific language (e.g. nb_NO) even when the site language differs, so you can run a localized calendar on a site that’s in another language.
Two authentication paths
- API key — for calendars marked “Make available to public” in Google Calendar. One field, paste, done.
- Service Account JSON — for private calendars without per-user OAuth. Upload the JSON, share the calendar with the service-account email, you’re set.
Credentials are encrypted at rest using a key derived from your site’s authentication salt. They are never echoed back into the admin UI — only the masked value and (for service accounts) the public service-account email are shown.
Theme-aware out of the box
The plugin reads your active theme’s theme.json color palette and uses your primary, accent, foreground, and background colors automatically. Per-display overrides let you set custom primary, accent, today-highlight, and link colors and force light/dark mode without touching code. Every design token is exposed as a CSS custom property so a developer can fully restyle the calendar from their theme stylesheet.
Five built-in theme presets
One-click coordinated colour bundles: Default (clean blue), Warm earth (cream + deep red), High contrast (solid black on white for AAA-stricter sites), Forest (deep green), Sunset (warm coral + amber).
Accessibility built in
WCAG 2.2 AA baseline with several AAA touches:
- Live contrast warnings on every colour picker — the admin UI shows the WCAG ratio against both light and dark surfaces with pass/fail markers as you choose colours
- Automatic high-contrast overlay via
prefers-contrast: more - Focus-visible halo: a 4px white ring behind the primary outline so focus stays visible against any chip background
prefers-reduced-motionhonored everywhere- ARIA roles and labels on the month grid, navigation, popovers, and view-toggle
- Semantic HTML throughout
- RTL-aware via CSS logical properties
- Tabular numerals for day numbers and time labels so single- and double-digit values don’t drift
Built for the WordPress.org standard
- Block editor first-class — server-side rendered, ServerSideRender preview, all the standard
InspectorControls - Shortcode and classic widget on the same render pipeline
- No bundled core libraries (no jQuery on front-end, no Guzzle, no Carbon, no Monolog)
- No third-party authentication relay — your credentials only ever talk directly to googleapis.com
- Translation ready via translate.wordpress.org once the plugin is published and indexed (no bundled
.po/.mo— WordPress auto-loads locale files intowp-content/languages/plugins/per the WP Plugin Handbook), plurals via_n(), JS strings viawp_localize_script - Free and GPLv2
For developers
Extension hooks are documented in docs/hooks.md inside the plugin folder. The first-release set includes filters for event data, event URLs, query args, cache TTL, render output, palette resolution, plus actions for refresh and uninstall lifecycle.
Third-Party Services
This plugin connects to the Google Calendar API to retrieve events from calendars you configure.
- Service: Google Calendar API v3
- Website: https://developers.google.com/calendar
- Terms of Service: https://developers.google.com/terms
- Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy
Data sent: the calendar ID(s) you configure, plus either your API key or a JSON Web Token signed with your service account credentials. Event data is returned to your server and cached locally as WordPress transients. No event data is sent to any third party.
The ICS subscribe feature, when enabled, serves a self-hosted iCalendar (.ics) feed from your own site — built from the same calendar data already fetched via the Google Calendar API above — so subscribers can add it in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook, or any other app that supports calendar subscriptions. No data is sent to any third party beyond the Google Calendar API connection already disclosed.
Blocks
This plugin provides 1 block.
- SDAweb Calendar Display events from one or more Google Calendars. Choose a saved display or configure inline.
Installation
- Upload the plugin to your
/wp-content/plugins/directory, or install it from the Plugins screen in WordPress. - Activate the plugin.
- Go to Settings SDAweb Calendar Sync to add your first calendar.
- Choose API key (public calendars) or Service Account (private calendars), follow the in-app setup guide, save.
- Create a display, choose a view, and copy its shortcode — or insert the SDAweb Calendar block in a page.
FAQ
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Do I need a Google account to use this plugin?
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You need a Google Cloud project to generate either an API key (for public calendars) or a service account (for private calendars). The plugin’s Help tab walks you through both setups in 7–8 steps each. Setup is one-time per site.
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Does this plugin send my data anywhere other than Google?
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No. Calendar data is fetched directly from
googleapis.comusing the Google Calendar API. The plugin does not contact any SDAweb-controlled servers, analytics endpoints, or third-party relays. There is no telemetry. -
Can I display a private (non-public) calendar?
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Yes. Use the Service Account authentication option. The plugin shows you the service account email; share your private calendar with that email in Google Calendar’s sharing settings, and the plugin can read it.
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How often does the plugin refresh events?
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A WP-Cron job refreshes registered calendars in the background every 15 minutes. Cache lifetime is configurable upward in the plugin settings (15 minutes is the enforced minimum). You can also click “Refresh now” on any calendar in the admin to fetch immediately.
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Does it work with caching plugins?
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Yes — the calendar HTML is part of the page output, so any page-cache plugin caches it like any other content. The cache will refresh on its own schedule. If you need immediate refresh after a calendar change, purge the page cache.
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Can I add multiple calendars to one display?
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Yes. Each display picks one or more registered calendars and merges them. Events are color-coded by calendar. A multi-feed legend strip can be enabled above the events; chips can be styled solid (single-feed) or pastel (multi-feed legibility).
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Will it work with my theme?
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The plugin reads your active theme’s
theme.jsoncolor palette automatically, so calendar colors match the site by default with zero configuration. If you use a classic theme withouttheme.json(or want to override), every color is exposed as a CSS variable that you can override from your theme stylesheet. Five built-in theme presets give you coordinated palettes with one click. -
Is the plugin accessible?
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Yes — built-in. WCAG 2.2 AA baseline includes
prefers-reduced-motionandprefers-contrast: moresupport,:focus-visibleoutlines with a white halo (visible on any background), ARIA labelling on the month grid, navigation, popovers, and view-toggle, semantic HTML throughout, RTL-aware via CSS logical properties, and live contrast warnings in the colour-picker UI as you choose values. -
Can I show the calendar in a different language than the rest of the site?
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Yes. Each display has an optional Locale override field — set it to
nb_NO,sv_SE, etc. and that calendar renders weekday names, month names, and built-in labels in that language regardless of the site’s language. Useful when an English site hosts Norwegian-audience content. -
Where are the extension hooks documented?
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In
docs/hooks.mdinside the plugin folder. The plugin commits to keeping documented hooks stable within a major version.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“SDAweb Calendar Sync for Google Calendar” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“SDAweb Calendar Sync for Google Calendar” has been translated into 1 locale. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “SDAweb Calendar Sync for Google Calendar” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
The most recent releases are listed here. The complete history is in
docs/CHANGELOG.md bundled with the plugin.
0.25.1
- Help: new section “Subscribe button (calendar feed)” explaining what subscribers get, the “Past events in the subscription” setting and the feed’s limits.
- Help: “Privacy and data flow” now explains that events marked Private in Google Calendar, and events without a title, are never shown.
0.25.0
- Privacy: events marked “Private” in Google Calendar are no longer shown, and neither are events without a title (Google can hand a private event to the site as an untitled “busy” block). This applies to every view and to the Subscribe feed. Developers can show them again with the
sdaweb_gcal_hide_private_eventsandsdaweb_gcal_hide_untitled_eventsfilters. - Fixed: on a busy calendar, a hiccup from Google part-way through a fetch saved only the first part of the events as if it were the full list, so later events disappeared for up to 15 minutes. The last complete copy is now kept and shown instead.
- New: “Past events in the subscription” under the Subscribe button setting. Choose how far back subscribers’ calendar apps go: the last 3 months (default), 6 or 12 months, or from a start date that repeats every year, such as 1 August for a school year.
- Changed: the Subscribe feed used to reach 1 year back and stop at 1000 events, so on a busy calendar it ended months early without warning. It now holds up to 2000 events, and if it ever reaches the limit, that is noted under Tools Diagnostics.
- Fixed: when switching views, a calendar could get links that pointed to another page on your site showing the same calendar, and old cached output could survive a plugin update for up to 15 minutes.
- Fixed: the Subscribe feed no longer includes an invalid organiser line with a made-up address.
- Fixed: on a server where PHP’s sodium extension is switched off, saving a calendar failed with a confusing technical error. Your Google credentials are now encrypted with WordPress’s built-in fallback in that case, and the Calendars tab explains the difference and recommends asking your host to enable the extension. Credentials are never stored unencrypted.
- Security hardening: the view-switching endpoint now caches its output only for real page addresses, so an outside request can no longer place its own web-address parameters into the calendar links other visitors see.
0.24.1
- Accessibility: in Month view, multi-day events (the bars that stretch across several days) were not marked as cells of the calendar grid, so screen readers could misreport the grid’s rows and columns (axe-core: aria-required-children). Each bar is now a grid cell. Nothing changes on screen.
- Accessibility: the full date on each Month day number (e.g. “7 October 2026”) was attached in a way most screen readers ignore, so only the bare number was read. The full date is now read out; the number on screen looks the same.
0.24.0
- Changed: an event whose description carries an “Info: ” line used to show a small ⓘ in front of its title — easy to miss, and it said nothing about what it meant. It now shows a “Read more ” badge after the title, in the display’s accent colour, in List, Cards, Day, Week, Upcoming, the hover popover and the “+N more” list; the compact Month and mini-calendar chips show just the arrow. The text can be changed per display under Localisation & overrides (e.g. “Les mer”), and the badge can get its own colour under Event links. Nothing changes for events without a marked link.
- New: “Only link events with a marked link” under Event links. Tick it to link only the events that have an “Info:” line — every other event is shown as plain text, with no link to Google Calendar. Off by default, so nothing changes until you tick it.
- Changed: in the display editor the two “open in” menus under Event links looked like duplicates; they are now “Open Google Calendar links in” and “Open “Read more” links in”, and the link settings are greyed out when the option they depend on is off.
0.23.6
- Fixed: on a site whose timezone lies west of the calendar’s — any site in the Americas with a Google calendar left on its default timezone, for example — every all-day event was shown one day early, in all views and in the hover popover. All-day events are now placed on their own date in the display’s timezone. Sites in Europe and further east were not affected and see no change.
- Fixed: in the Subscribe popover, the “Android (Google Calendar app)” choice had an empty link, so on an Android phone it never opened the Calendar app; it reloaded the page or landed on Google’s “Add by URL” page instead. It opens the app again. The other three choices were unaffected.