Finally, a working Add-to-Calendar Button
--
TLDR;
I’ve created a simple and free JavaScript snippet, which generates beautiful add-to-calendar buttons — and can be operated by basically anybody.
⚠️ Stop! There is a new version out!
If you want to jump directly to the new V2, you should continue with the latest article at:
⬆️ ⬆️ ⬆️
If you keep on reading, you will find out more about how such open source projects emerge and how it all started.
Background
I am getting married.
This is great news, but it comes with obligations and implications. One of them has been the creation of a website to inform guest about the date. Yes, we saved on the printed save-the-date card and wanted to use a website instead. And even if I’ve planned differently, I ended up coding the website myself from scratch — I am still asking myself “why the hell” every single day.
Anyhow, building this website, I needed to include a simple way for the users to add this event to their calendars.
Since I really did not want to spend too much time on this, I was looking for some easy to use script, package, whatsoever.
The Problem
I did not find anything, which matched my requirements.
Basically all free packages and code you find, is somehow outdated. It uses either some very old, no longer supported, schemes — or lacked of some basic functionality like creating an iCal/ics file.
On the other side, I found like 2000 references to addevent.com.
With “references”, I mean Google entries, but even more, codepens. There, many people (or fake people? 🙊) simply placed the code to integrate the addevent basic button. I am not sure why you would put that on codepen, but it is there.
