I am excited to announce third party calendar integration with Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar, along with timezone support for the date & time pickers.

Show and manage events coming from third party calendars

Whether you would like to load events from a public calendar or you would like to enable the management of the events from private calendars, let people use their Outlook or Google calendars as a backend, that’s all possible with the new integration plugin. We have studied the stories we heard from customers and there were three distinctive jobs:

• People just wanted to show events from a public calendar in a nice, responsive view on their website
• Developers wanted to enable their users to load their personal calendars so that they can have a better handle on scheduling
• Developers wanted to enable their users to load, add/edit/delete and sync events to their personal calendars

We are launching a new product that can be loaded as an add-on on top of the event calendar and provides a unified and easy way to handle these jobs with Google and Outlook Calendars. The API includes authentication, calendar listing, loading and event syncing with add/edit/delete.

The best thing is that you won’t need to write complicated plumbing code to convert the events coming from the external calendars in a format that Mobiscroll understands. The reading and writing, conversion is all done in the plugin. Of course, it is possible to extend it and write a more complex event handling logic if needed.

The integration plugin is available as an add-on to the “Scheduling & Calendaring” license and it is included in the “Complete” license.

Give the demos a look, load your google & outlook calendar events or see how you can display events from public google calendars. There are examples available for the:

• Event calendar: Syncing with google calendar and syncing with outlook
• Scheduler: Syncing with google calendar and syncing with outlook
• Timeline: Syncing with google calendar and syncing with outlook
• Agenda: Syncing with google calendar and syncing with outlook

Work with different timezones in the date & time picker

Since we introduced timezones to the event calendar, supporting use-cases that involve multiple timezones became much easier, the code became cleaner and it was a more polished experience using Mobiscroll.

One piece of the puzzle that was missing was the date & time pickers supporting multiple timezones. This was really an issue when events were edited and shown in one timezone but saved in a different one. 

Starting with 5.15 it is possible to pass datetimes in one timezone (usually UTC in multi-timezone scenarios) and enable selection in either local time or any timezone for that matter.

Before 5.15 this needed to be handled manually by developers, meaning they had to convert the datetimes between data and display timezones.

We use external libraries to handle the timezone conversion, currently supporting moment-timezone and luxon, the same way as it is handled in the event calendar. Check out this guide on how to get started and explore the demos.

What’s next?

We are working on a number of QOL improvements, multiple timezone tracks for the scheduler and virtual scrolling for the timeline.

For a full list of changes check out the release notes and download the latest version.

Illustration by Icons 8 from Ouch!