Bring back Events feature

[SamuelmdLow]

Before we moved to wagtail we had an events feature where we drew calendar items from https://events.ubc.ca/ and also allowed people to submit events to be featured. This is what it looked like https://web.archive.org/web/20170915030054/https://www.ubyssey.ca/events/

Heres a version where the .py files still existed: https://github.com/ubyssey/ubyssey.ca/tree/e846d66349fb75cba5e5a7f429b984704a62191a/ubyssey/events

We also need to show these events somewhere on the homepage or no one will use it

[SamuelmdLow]

I think this feature would be much better if we centralized all the events from the various faculty websites. Unfortunately the UBC website does not provide a ics file or rss feed. It is of course possible to parse these things but parsing html should only be a last resort because it means our feature will be highly dependant on the structure of their page - which could change at any time. I plan on emailing the UBC webmaster to inquire about implementing an rss feed of ics file.

[SamuelmdLow]

The REST api for events.ubc might be useful

https://events.ubc.ca/wp-json/wp/v2/posts

ical is more useful probably view-source:https://events.ubc.ca/events/?ical=1

[SamuelmdLow]

We can get the icalendar for sports from here https://gothunderbirds.ca/calendar.ashx/calendar.ics

The rss feed is https://gothunderbirds.ca/calendar.ashx/calendar.rss in case that is needed

[SamuelmdLow]

The ams website also has an icalendar file http://www.ams.ubc.ca/event/?ical=1

[SamuelmdLow]

UBC academic calendar (most seems not useful) https://vancouver.calendar.ubc.ca/academic-year/118/rss.xml

UBC physics and astronomy has an events page which seemed cool but there is no ical file for all the events, no rss feed, and they use Drupal CMS SO NOT EVEN A WORDPRESS API 😭😭😭 https://phas.ubc.ca/events

The Law school has an rss feed https://allard.ubc.ca/about-us/events-calendar/rss

STATISTICS HAS ICAL http://www.stat.ubc.ca/events-calendar-feed/2024-06

computer science calendar has no api or alternate but its pretty easy to scrape I guess https://www.cs.ubc.ca/news-events/calendar/202404

scrape https://beatymuseum.ubc.ca/visit/calendar/

rest api for economics calendar (pretty cool) https://seminars.econ.ubc.ca/rest/?start=2023-07-01T00%3A00%3A00-06%3A00&end=2024-08-10T00%3A00%3A00-06%3A00

[SamuelmdLow]

I found the ical for the computer science calendar. Weird they hid it. https://www.cs.ubc.ca/views/ical/related_events/calendar.ics

[SamuelmdLow]

So far I've done gothunderbirds, events.ubc, cs.ubc, stats.ubc

[SamuelmdLow]

Even(t) more calendars! https://www.liveatubc.ca/events/?ical=true

(not sure if worth scraping because events.ubc seems to syndicate some of their events but should watch to see if it has cool unique events once the academic year begins)

[SamuelmdLow]

I scraped events.ubc to get all the organizers of their events, their websites, and their events pages. Heres the spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OJNmYg1ZuZ5U8gyHHALj6koALH32MUF8NwsLWqny1as/edit?usp=sharing

I will expand this to identifying rss and ical feeds and APIs automatically. At which point we can test out using these calendars on our events page

[SamuelmdLow]

We are low on entertainment https://chancentre.com/events/feed/ https://tickets.ubc.ca/

[SamuelmdLow]

omggg directory of all(?) ubc subdomains: https://www.ubc.ca/our-campuses/vancouver/directories/a-to-z.html

[SamuelmdLow]

I should add comments to the code!!!