What elmcity curators do

The elmcity calendar service is for:

  1. Contributors who publish calendars on their own websites.

  2. Curators who merge calendars from many contributors into a hub.

  3. Users who view or subscribe to individual calendars on contributors' websites, and/or merged calendars on a hub.

Overview

This page shows how elmcity curators gather calendar feeds from contributors, route them through hubs, and publish them on websites. (See What elmcity contributors do for the contributors' point view.) Consider a regional wine commission with a merged calendar that features wine-tasting events hosted by all the wineries in the region. Each winery has an events page on its own website, and wants those events to appear also on the commission's merged calendar. The wineries are contributors to an elmcity hub. The wine commission is the curator of the hub. Here's the big picture from the commission's point of view.

The hub is a service that works behind the scenes to gather all the wineries' events and combine them into the merged calendar. Curators create hubs, add feeds to their hubs, and display their hubs' merged calendars on websites.

1) How curators create hubs

A hub is defined by two sets of data. One defines basic information about the hub: its location, its timezone. The other is a list of feeds that flow into the hub and then flow out as a merged feed.

How curators define basic information about hubs

In this example the wine commission's administrator asks the elmcity administrator to start a new hub, providing these facts:

  1. An ID for the hub: WineCommission

  2. A location: Washington State

  3. A timezone: Pacific

  4. A Twitter, Facebook, or Windows Live account name

After the the elmcity administrator approves the hub, the wine commission's administrator signs into elmcity, using the Twitter, Facebook, or Windows Live account, to:

  1. Adjust the hub's default settings (if needed)

  2. Add feeds to the hub

How curators publish merged calendars

The hub provides merged calendars in a variety of formats. The wine commission's webmaster can simply use the hub's merged HTML page on the Events page at http://wine-commission.com/events, optionally applying the styles in use at wine-commission.com.

Or, if the webmaster needs more control over the presentation, raw data feeds (XML, JSON, ICS) are available. These can be read, processed, and presented in any way required.