[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 447 entitled, simplifying WordPress calendar events and ticketing with Jonathan Jernigan of Pie Calendar.
It was published on Thursday, the 27th of November, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we get to our chat with Jonathan, just a few very short bits of housekeeping.
The first thing to mention is our Black Friday page, I keep droning on about it. It's at wpbuilds.com/black. Over there right now, you're gonna find about 350 WordPress deals all in the Black Friday space. So that could be themes, plugins, blocks, hosting, whatever. It's searchable. It's filterable. Once more, wpbuilds.com/black. There are no affiliate links or anything like that, but there are still some advertising spots at the top in the cards if you would like to get your product or service noticed.
But it's all getting a bit crazy. I'm getting so many emails at the moment, so this is a way to avoid that email deluge. Just go to our page, wpbuilds.com/black. Bookmark it and go there instead of receiving all the emails instead. 'cause we've probably got the deals in a searchable, filterable way for you.
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And if there's anything that you want to question, please feel free to reach out to me. [email protected] is my email address. Reach out and we'll have a discussion. Whatever it may be that you have questions about.
Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Jonathan Jernigan. He's been on the podcast before, but we are back. He's talking about Pie Calendar, which is a project he's doing with Elijah Mills, and it's a really straightforward, simple calendar implementation for your WordPress website. Bind posts and pages and all of those kind of things to a calendar event and display those on your WordPress website.
But now they've introduced this idea of a connector, and it's gonna enable you to use ICS and also connect to things like Eventbrite and a bunch of other things in the future. So now Pie Calendar will enable you to display your ticketed events as well.
There's quite a lot in here, which is new. So if you heard the previous episode, this is definitely worth a listen. I'm using it on the wpbuilds.com website, have done for well over a year, and I really can rate this plugin. Love it a lot, and I hope that you enjoy the episode with Jonathan.
I am joined on the podcast again by Jonathan Jernigan. Hello.
[00:03:07] Jonathan Jernigan: Hello. Hello. Glad to be back.
[00:03:09] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome, Jonathan and I have just, we've put the world to rights. We've had I don't know, 40 minutes of just the whole gamut of the universe, life, everything.
And and at some point I thought we really should push the record button. So I did. And and here we are, that. It tells me a lot about you, Jonathan. It means that I can talk to you and I think you're a thoroughly nice human being. so there's that. You what? You also think you're a nice human being, but Jonathan's not here to put the world to rights with you.
Dear listener. Jonathan's here to talk about Pie Calendar, which is a project that he is doing with Elijah Mills. They've been at it for a few years. We did a podcast previously. it is a plugin for WordPress, and we'll get into all the bits and pieces that it did do as well as all the new things that it can do.
That's quite exciting. But before we get into that, Jonathan, honestly, it's a banal question, but I've got to ask it. Will you just tell us who you are? Like give us your potted bio one minute, something like that.
[00:04:10] Jonathan Jernigan: Sure I have been in the WordPress space, since late 2014. I originally started, went to school for like computer engineering, did computer repair and that sort of thing. And after leaving that day job with the intent to start a, computer repair business, everyone said, Hey, do you do websites?
And I. sure.
[00:04:31] Nathan Wrigley: I do now.
[00:04:32] Jonathan Jernigan: eventually I realized people weren't calling me for computer repair. They were calling for website design. And so I found WordPress as we all do, and moved through various different builders over the years. Spent a lot of time in oxygen builder and, in the last couple of years I've been working pretty much exclusively and generate press and generate blocks, which works really well for me and the types of clients that I've supported over the years.
and then. More recently, I've, I've created content on YouTube around WordPress for a variety of different plugins and how to type content, as well as a little community for generate press folks. And, and then of course, PI calendar. And that tends to be my main focus these days is the community and, the, plugin.
we're at about two and a half years of, PI calendar, and it continues to just chug away. It's great.
[00:05:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, we will get onto PI calendar in a moment, but you can't come here, drop those little bombshells and not promote yourself in that way. So first of all, let's deal with the YouTube channel. Are you still, putting out content on a regular basis? And, where do we find it? What's the, URL for that?
[00:05:39] Jonathan Jernigan: It is an extremely irregular basis. but the YouTube channel is just my name. It's Jonathan Jernigan. So if you search that, you'll be able to find me relatively easily. And I tend to put out videos, just when I find something neat or interesting or if I overcome a challenge. but funny enough, I've.
I've been doing it so long now. The channel I created in 2018 and I have over 200 videos to the point where I just, a couple weeks ago I was so proud of this thing. I recorded this super cool video on fluent community, which is what I use to power my, my generate press and, courses, community, that sort of thing.
The, I was so proud of it. I was like, this is so neat. I showed people how it works. I showed behind the scenes. After I recorded, I realized. I've already done this
[00:06:28] Nathan Wrigley: Oh no.
[00:06:28] Jonathan Jernigan: I forgot. That was the first time I realized after the fact, I was like, oh, I've already done this. And so now that I've been aware of that, I've realized a lot of times I wanna do these ideas.
Or like somebody asks, can you make a video on this? And I'm like, wait, I've already done that. Here's the
[00:06:47] Nathan Wrigley: that's great. The two 200 is the ceiling of your, memory limit.
[00:06:53] Jonathan Jernigan: pretty much.
[00:06:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I will put that into the show notes, the link to the YouTube channel over there, but okay. Let's focus on this other thing which you are making much more use of in terms of your time and how much of resources you allocate to it.
So it's your. Your community, you've already described that it's built on the, the fluent community plugin. There's a nice plug for them as well. But, what, is it like, what are you educating over there? Have you got, room for more people or is it, yeah, go for it. Tell
[00:07:21] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah. The, idea with the community came about because I have quite a few different courses that are of, varying scopes. and some of them were, quite large in size and also, of course in dollar value, they were reasonably expensive. And, for example, I have a. A beginner's guide to CSS.
So you start from l knowing absolutely nothing about CSS 50 lessons later, you're gonna be writing CSS, completely by hand, by memory. And I'm very proud of that course. but it became a thing where somebody wants to generate course and they want the CSS course, but they're facing a, $500 bill for the two of them. And so I put them all inside a fluent community and created a, some discussion areas of varying topics like hosting and, things like DNS and a website feedback area, and realized like, I can probably just fire up a, community that's 20 bucks a month, you get access to, everything and you participate in the discussions.
Occasionally I host live sessions that are sometimes themed around office hours or sometimes themed around a specific thing. every once in a while I find a cool thing that I've built for a client project and I'll bring that to the group. and then otherwise, some, people just join simply to take a bunch of courses.
I, I have people that will join for a month, smash through every piece of content, and then cancel immediately. it's, there's, a variety there. Some people wanna stick around because they don't wanna be on Facebook. They wanna talk to other WordPress folks that are not a part of a social media group, and that this is a great platform for that.
So the, the community for me has been something that's done unexpectedly well. I just. I was very hesitant to launch it simply because how, difficult it is to pull people off of a social group. and fortunately I had a decent sized email list, so it got a, jumpstart right outta the gate.
and we're over a hundred members now, so there's a decent, there's a decent chunk of folks in there.
[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's so great. One piece is missing from this jigsaw puzzle, and that is the URL. Where do we find that?
[00:09:27] Jonathan Jernigan: Ah, yes. if you visit my main [email protected], you'll see the various places, like on the, course landing pages. There's a specific, a specific place for the community that talks about, what's included and the purpose of it. but the actual community is what's the word?
Basically enough, community dot jonathan jernigan.com.
[00:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's great. I, will link to that again into the show notes. So if anybody's curious about that. W would you say that, that like your, biggest hitter is like generate, can generate press generate blocks content? Is that, the most likely win If somebody comes along,
[00:10:06] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah, most likely. And the primarily I, think folks tend to find. Generate press and generate blocks with, with the hope that they can create websites that are more simple for their in client. And then the nowadays generate blocks has become quite a bit more complicated with all of the, classes and all the extra styling that you can do, which is great because.
There's pretty much no layouts that you can't build in the UI directly now because it's so much more powerful. Of course, the side effect of that being that the learning curve is quite a bit more steep than it used to be. It used to be pretty reasonable that somebody could just hop in and figure it
[00:10:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it was point and click really, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:10:48] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah. Now it's more akin to it's almost closer to a BrickX or an oxygen in the sense that you can do classes and conditions and all these sort of more complicated things. But it also is the kind of thing that if you've never experienced that, once you, learn it, you're like, I don't know how I ever lived without any of this stuff.
So many of these crucial tools like CSS classes, for example, when, you start using it and you suddenly your client says, Hey, we got a new brand, or whatever, some hypothesis like, like a scenario like that where they're, they want some big change and you do it in one spot and it happens to the whole site.
You're like. It's, transformational. I still remember in Oxygen Builder when I first discovered those sorts of things, being like, this is amazing. And nowadays that's, possible in the block editor with tools like cadence and generate
[00:11:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm a big fan of generate blocks. It's like my, the sort of go-to for many of the things that I do. And, there was a big shift between one point x and 2.0 when it first came out. Like a lot of the ui, like a, lot of the visible UI stayed the same, but then as soon as U opened the accordion panels and getting to the settings quite a lot has changed.
And, way more options, but a little bit more in terms of fids and yeah, it would've been great to have a call. That I could, have followed along instead of, hitting my head against the wall. So we will link to your community, in the show notes, and hopefully we'll get you some, some more traffic.
That'd be really nice. But, the primary reason for chatting to Jonathan today is, PI Calendar. I've been a user of PI Calendar. ooh. I.
[00:12:24] Jonathan Jernigan: Day one, almost.
[00:12:25] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I think so. Fair. Fairly early on. And, and I'll just tell you my experience with it. it's like super simple calendar implementation. In my case, I want to turn a WordPress post into a calendar event.
And so that's exactly why I bought it, because that's exactly what it began doing. And we'll find out some more stuff in a moment. you get some, you, log into the WordPress backend, set a few things up, really a few things. And then, and you go to a post and there's a new little option and you say you toggle it on.
Do you want this to be a calendar event? Yes, I do. Do you want add some color to that? Yes, I do. When does it start? When does it end? And that's what it. Did. And then that gets put into a calendar and it's got popups on the front end so that people can add things to their, to their I Cal or their office 3, 6, 5, and all of that kind of stuff.
So really simple, really straightforward, exactly what I needed. but then you've more recently obviously been scratching your head a little bit and thinking, okay, we got that, we smashed that. What can we do next? So what's the new fun stuff that you've got?
[00:13:30] Jonathan Jernigan: so of course we have a, a free version in the WordPress plugin repository, which does effectively what you described. it's, just a, really easy and straightforward to use event, calendar plugin. And then we have the pro version, which has recurring events and blackout dates and those sorts of things.
Really what you would need to manage any kind of operation that's more than just. a, one-to-one kind of relationship. a lot of times we see it for like gyms or churches or things like
[00:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah. Okay.
[00:13:59] Jonathan Jernigan: they have a class, every Thursday at 8:00 PM and it just, it replicates that out for you.
Or like civic organizations that have, like, council meetings on very specific days and times, but not this date. And then if it falls on this date, it's gotta move to that date kind of thing. So we have the controls for all of that. and that's, existed for well over a year now. and so we started to really look at what we wanted to do next, but still keeping our key philosophy of simple, lightweight, easy to use.
And we decided that the, next big thing, which we knew from the outset was going to be our number one most requested feature. And of course it was, is event ticketing. And we knew that we didn't want to do our own custom, event ticketing solution simply because. When you start to go down the rabbit hole of all that's involved, it's astoundingly big.
it's like, on the level of building a WooCommerce competitor kind of deal, And that's just totally unrealistic and pretty much against the ethos of PI calendar and everything we want for our, businesses. we decided that it made sense to look at what other integrations are out there, and turns out Eventbrite has an extremely competent, API that we were able to, tap into.
And so you can now create, events on Eventbrite that just push to PI calendar and so people can come to the site and view all your ticketed events and go, do the mess of things that Eventbrite provides, like taxes and. Multi-tiered ticketing and a seat map and reporting and all the things that we would be faced with building ourselves are now just part of this direct integration.
But then along the way, we realized, wait a second, we could do the same thing for any ICS feed, whether it be a Google Calendar, Yahoo, apple, like Basecamp for example, has a calendar built into it, my project management software, and it gives you an ICS feed. You just drop in to PI calendar, and then it just displays all your ICS events.
And so as that ICS feed changes, as you make changes in Google Calendar or Basecamp or whatever, it just automatically pushes those. Changes to your site. we had a.
[00:16:15] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. Sorry. Keep going.
[00:16:16] Jonathan Jernigan: I was gonna say one more thing. We, stumbled upon a fantastic option as well, which is that you can just take an ICS file if you so choose, drop it in your WordPress media library and use that.
So you don't even necessarily have to have an external third party source. You could have an app that gives you an ICS file and you just self-host that if you choose to. So there's a lot of flexibility with that particular. solution and we bundled all that together in a separate add-on to keep it all, clean and separated from the main plugin If you don't want anything to do with it.
[00:16:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so let's tackle that bit first, then we'll get into the three different bits and pieces of, that. So this I, if you've got pi calendar from the repo, this, bit that you've just described, the, Eventbrite and the ICS and the ICS download, I'll call it for want of a better word, they require you to have a pro account or how, does it basically, how does it work?
[00:17:10] Jonathan Jernigan: No. So the connector add-on is, fully supported in the free version. So if you just wanna purchase the connector and use the free version of PI calendar, you can absolutely do that. and of course it will support recurring events from your ICS provider. So if you created a recurring event every week on, Thursday at 8:00 PM like I mentioned earlier in your Google Calendar, those are gonna show up on PI calendar free, despite the fact that it technically doesn't support recurring events.
same thing is true for Eventbrite. If you don't want. Any of the, pro features of PI calendar, but you want all the event ticketing stuff. You just have the connector and PI calendar free. but you can, of course have the pro version and then mix all the events together. So you could have one calendar of only native PI calendar events or another calendar that has Eventbrite ICS, and native all in one if you so
[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay, so let me just pause that. So at the very least, you need the free version of the repo. There are some constraints around that in terms of recurring events and. That kind of thing, but if you want to have that, you'd get the pro version of the plugin and then these things that you've just described, the Eventbrite and what have you, that's an add-on, which can go with free or pro.
Have I got? Yeah. Okay, great. Okay, so going to the Eventbrite thing, I totally share. I completely understand where you are coming from, like the idea. I'm sure that you went into it with oh yeah, we'll just build our own thing. It'll be totally fine. And then the more that you peel back the layers of the onion, it must have been slightly eye watering.
oh, yeah, there's that. Oh yeah. And what about that? What about this thing? And, people canceling things, refunding people wanting to know how long it is before they can cancel, when money gets involved, it's just like a totally different layer. and so going to Eventbrite. I, could be wrong about this, but it feels like Eventbrite is like the default.
It would be the one that most people would Google and succeed in finding.
[00:19:08] Jonathan Jernigan: I, think that's true. And people do have a, we have had some people that are like, oh, Eventbrite, use this other one instead. But it's I've never even heard of some of the suggestions people were making. And the, Eventbrite, I believe as well is extremely ubiquitous and I used it a lot in the agency work that I used to do for, this nonprofit I was a part of that hosted these concerts and they were.
They were paid events, but the, only way that we found that it was conceivable, despite the fact that they had a WordPress site where the, people on the board of this organization could manage the events was through Eventbrite. We just could not find a way in WordPress that just made sense, that was logical and easy and had all the things that we need.
And then the other thing that's cool is with Eventbrite, they do charge fees, but like for that nonprofit, there's, you have the option to just simply pass on those fees to the, consumer, which is not a practice I particularly like. But that is the, the space that we're in.
And so effectively you could use the, free version of PI calendar, the buy the separate connector, and then have no fees from Eventbrite. 'cause you're just passing those
[00:20:23] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. That makes sense. So
[00:20:25] Jonathan Jernigan: But you're right. The, I was just gonna say, when we first looked at this development process, we thought, oh, maybe, we can get away with letting people use their own form plugin, maybe gravity forms, fluent forms, that sort of thing.
Like we could just tie into that. And they were like, no, because there's, time-based tickets and there's tier and there's all these other things. The thing that finally killed the idea once and for all of building it myself was when I realized, oh boy, we'd have to be, we'd have to watch out for taxes for any jurisdiction around the world.
And I was like, Nope, we are out and we are not doing
[00:20:59] Nathan Wrigley: just, that alone is a complete killer. obviously you could do it, but you are, for a, plugin that you are, you're trying to launch and you don't already have a million subscribers, there's a whole thing there, and people will come to you when it doesn't. map out in the way that they anticipate, and it will be up to you to fix that kind of stuff.
So I, I can totally get it and I understand why you've gone in that route. okay, so let's imagine that I'm a, I dunno, a concert venue. I put on gigs, I put on bands many times a week. I log into my event, Bri. I set that stuff up. I connect the Connect Your Connector plugin. What does that then mean? How does the workflow work?
Do I work inside of Eventbrite and then somehow that maps onto my WordPress site? So just explain how it works and where things end up on WordPress.
[00:21:50] Jonathan Jernigan: It's a great question. So the, PI calendar by default is exactly as you described. You take a WordPress post and you attach some event times to it, and it just shows up on the calendar. Conversely, with. The Google calendar, ICS or any other ICS provider? I say Google a lot 'cause that's
[00:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's what I use. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:22:08] Jonathan Jernigan: but it works for any, ICS provider like Outlook.
Even Outlook Desktop gives you an ICS file, for example. you would create your events on your Outlook calendar or your Google Calendar or your Eventbrite event. You would manage all of that from the web portal and just via the, in, in the case of Eventbrite, you have an API key. You drop into your WordPress side and then they just attach together.
So anytime you make a change, it just pushes from Eventbrite to your site and, takes, a minute or two for everything to sync up typically. And then it just shows up on the WordPress side. So yeah, you would manage everything from the Eventbrite portal, or like in Google Calendar, you manage it on Google Cal and it just pushes the changes periodically.
[00:22:51] Nathan Wrigley: so in the scenario that I'm using it, I use it on the WP builds.com website. I go into a post, create the stuff there, and I know that it's bound to that post. In the scenario that you are describing this ICS. Whether it's from Eventbrite or Apple or wherever it comes from, the it, there's no post created at the moment.
It's spies. There's a new event. This is just a display of that in your chosen calendar layout. So you might have a, you might have a, what do they call it, where it's just one event after another, or you can have a month view and a day view and a three day view. Those kind of things. Is it, is that how it's implemented?
So it's not creating its own post and chucking stuff in there, it's just displaying it. On the, wherever you've embedded the, the calendar.
[00:23:34] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah, so the. Technically it does move some information into your database temporarily, but it's not a WordPress post. It's not, it's like a, a thing that you, would manipulate or really have anything to do with just simply a place for us to be able to pull that, information from.
So the, from Eventbrite specifically, they have the little web hooks that fire, if you've changed the event time or title or whatever, it then pings your site and it says, Hey. Updated information, grab that from me. And then PI calendar just takes that information that it has now fetched and displays it among the list of, like you said, it could be in the list view or the, calendar grid view, for example.
and so it's, relatively seamless. from the front end perspective, you would never know that they're, being fetched remotely from, Eventbrite,
[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: And, can you do the same thing that you can at the moment? Can you, for example, I don't know, I'm. Might have in my rock. I might, in my, concert venue, I might have classical gigs and I might have rock gigs, or I might have you, you can imagine I wanna apply a taxonomy to it.
Is there a way that I can do that sort of thing so that I could color for the one? Let's go with color. I can imagine there's other ways of doing it, but let, could I colorize something? So here's the rock gigs in blue and here's the classical gigs all in green and so on. Does that, can I do those kind of things to make the calendar stand out for certain people in certain ways?
[00:24:59] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah, so it's funny you say that because we have a relatively rudimentary color system at the moment, but it's something I want to improve in the future. However, people have. Done the most, incredible like Christmas tree, like color colorizations of their events to the point where I'm like, this is incredible.
How did you pull this off? This is so well done. Like people have, really customized it to fit quite extensively. and then. Another example is we had a, brewery reach out that, not only has different types of events, like you mentioned for game night or buy one, get one type nights, but they also had two separate locations and the locations would have different events depending on the day.
So that was like the second layer. and they were able to use our, what we call the custom views, API, which basically just gives you the ability to manipulate. Almost anything on the, front end of the calendar via code, of course. And they were able to just color code depending on what, what location it was based on the category.
So in WordPress, their, events were just, or excuse me, their locations were just categories. And so then that just color coded automatically. and, that's been a, part of the approach that we've taken. We intentionally don't have every single feature you could ever want. But most of it can be done with a little code snippet and we have a lot of, docs like, out there that
[00:26:26] Nathan Wrigley: I've made use of those. There's quite a lot of little code snippets where you can, figure out how to modify things, on the Pi Cal website. Okay, so just an aside for a minute, you mentioned a brewery. I, just think that's so interesting that. You've, like your plugin has collided you with a brewery, and I imagine that brewery is not the only kind of interesting customer that you've come across.
There's no question there, but I just think that's such an interesting thing about a project like this is that you end up talking to people from all manner of different walks of life, I don't know, healthcare providers, yoga teachers, all, that's, that must be curious when the support tickets drop in and you think, oh look, it's being used like this.
[00:27:09] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah. fir first of all, the variety of people worldwide that, that use it. And then also the different organizations that use it too. Like early on it was, small scale operations, churches, farmer's markets like gyms, that sort of thing. Now. It's not uncommon to get a support request that ends in.gov.
[00:27:31] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:27:32] Jonathan Jernigan: then like we have, people like that use it. Like the, there's a, an organization in Austin, Texas, like, the city council website of Austin, Texas has PI calendar on it. And those are moments where I step back and I'm like, holy crap, what have we created here? This is crazy. And
[00:27:52] Nathan Wrigley: But, really interesting in that you are having a material effect on people's. Lives, it's hard to encapsulate what I'm trying to say there, but, if you are a, I don't know if, you've just starting up a yoga studio or something like that, and you may not have a lot of money to burn through on the website side of things.
But you just, you know that this is a crucial component that you need, and you've heard a WordPress and okay, how do I bind all of these different bits and pieces together? And you can totally do it. You can completely do that all alone. You don't need a, you probably maybe want to get a developer into sort of like tidy things up a bit, but you are enabling those kind of people. To live the life that they want through the business that they want. And, it, calendar for any business like that is a completely expected ui. You've got to have that in order to make that business function. You don't wanna do it from a Word document or a PDF or anything like that.
So again, there's no question there, but that's that. I'd get great satisfaction if I were you from that.
[00:28:55] Jonathan Jernigan: I appreciate that. It's a, good perspective to look back on and, it really stems from the fact that, from the outset we, operated, or you, we architected this thing to be as simple as possible while still allowing people who wanna take it to the next level. they can absolutely do that.
And we, from the, at the very beginning, we jokingly called the setup process our world famous. Four minute quick start guide because you really could, the WordPress, excuse me, the YouTube tutorial we created was four minutes long from installing the plugin, adding an event, dropping the calendar.
you can do it in less than five minutes.
[00:29:32] Nathan Wrigley: need one short code, that's it. And drop it in. And you, yeah, he's got some parameters so you can exclude or include certain things or make it look a certain way by default. And it's, yeah, it's dead
[00:29:42] Jonathan Jernigan: there's a fully featured block too,
[00:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you, oh, okay. I think I'm still using the short codes. I should probably use the block.
[00:29:48] Jonathan Jernigan: The short code got so unruly with so many different options that now there's a proper block and you can see the changes you're making in real time as to what it's going to look like on the front end. So that's really
[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: I totally need to use the block in that case, I still
[00:30:00] Jonathan Jernigan: is so much
[00:30:01] Nathan Wrigley: the short code with many parameters. Okay, so the, okay, let's stay with the Eventbrite side of things. The, if I'm over there and I'm creating multiple events for my, concert venue, and that syncs and it goes onto my calendar and somebody comes to the front end of my website and they see, I don't know, rock Concert X is happening on Friday and they click on it the way that I've got it set up, I use the month view and a little modal pops up with.
Information about that presumably sucked in through the Eventbrite API and what have you, and there's options to add it to my calendar or what have you in this scenario. Presumably there's a button though, in that setup. I don't use a button 'cause I'm not trying to drive traffic to a, book now thing.
And there presumably there's a button where they would end up back at the Eventbrite event page so that they could then purchase it.
[00:30:49] Jonathan Jernigan: Exactly, yeah. In the little popup modal, the, link simply just switches to view on Eventbrite and it takes you to that specific event. Details page, which of course then on the Eventbrite side has been heavily optimized over years and millions of dollars to, to be perfect for conversions. So that's why we, just felt like it doesn't make sense for us to try to reinvent the
[00:31:10] Nathan Wrigley: No,
[00:31:12] Jonathan Jernigan: and in the future too, there, there are some functions where we can actually have the whole, Eventbrite process take place. On the, WordPress site, which we're investigating. We're not sure the trade-offs of like performance and especially accessibility. We're not sure of how exactly all of that kind of jives.
But, we would aim to, in the future, consider at least having the ability to have it all take place right on the WordPress site, even though, under the hood it's still running Eventbrite. But that way you don't have to leave the site like, I love Stripe for that reason. I can do it all on my site.
I don't have to go out to PayPal and then
come
[00:31:48] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, It's kinda curious as a kind of person who's been involved in the web for years, I've always obsessed about this whole sort of like white label disguising where things are thing, but the more I look at like regular non-technical people, the more I realize they don't actually care that much.
In all honesty, Oh, nobody's thinking what? Eventbrite, I, dare. They send me to Eventbrite. It's just it's a thing you just go to event. Oh yeah, okay. This is where we buy it. So I, I've, I'm always leaning into the white labeling. They try to disguise it, make it look like your own.
But then the more, I interact with regular people and look over their shoulder and see what they're actually doing, the, more I realize, do you know what, if it's a trusted thing, like Eventbrite, it actually maybe adds some kudos rather than takes it away. They see that, okay, I'm going through this platform, I've.
Completely familiar with this. I've already got an account 'cause I've used them before. it's fine. I'll proceed. Whereas actually the opposite might be, worse. Oh, who, who's this little gym website or this little, so there's, little trade off there. You also mentioned that there's a.
Like an ICS connection that you can make. So for example, you mentioned Google Calendar and what have you, so push put in Eventbrite to one side. How does that work? You go into Google Calendar, in my case, find, go into settings, find a particular ICS link from a particular calendar that you have, and you just copy and paste that into the settings over in PI calendar from that moment on.
Anything in that calendar displays. Is that how it works?
[00:33:17] Jonathan Jernigan: That's exactly it. It couldn't be any more intuitive. there's literally nothing else for you to
[00:33:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So you, literally just do one copy and paste exercise, and then everything that goes inside that calendar appears.
[00:33:29] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah, and it was super important for me, to not have, to mess around with API keys or, Google console to activate the API and all that garbage. and luckily the ICS standard is built in a way that is designed to be as simple as that. So just like you described, you grab the I-C-S-U-R-L, you drop it into PI calendar, and specifically in the block, if you're, if you've clicked on the block in the editor and the right hand sidebar at the bottom, you just drop in that, that I-C-S-U-R-L and it will just appear, And then the, you can have as many ICS feeds in one calendar as you want too. So
[00:34:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.
[00:34:10] Jonathan Jernigan: multiple Google calendars all in one on your PI calendar, on your site, or. You could have you, two separate sources like Google and Basecamp or Google and Yahoo or whatever. and then of course you can also self-host the ICS file too.
So just take the URL from your media library and drop that in and it will just display those ICS. Of course, you won't get the, continuous sync like you would with a remote calendar like Google, but you can self host the ICS file too, if you want.
[00:34:38] Nathan Wrigley: So just to, I described that as a download earlier. So this is the capacity for you to download the state of your calendar as it is at the moment, for example, and you can then put that into the media library. Upload it into Pi Cal and it will consume all the events that are in there. But obviously it's not synchronized with anything.
Once that, once those events have been consumed, you'd either have to do that again or sync it with a regular kind of Google calendar will keep using that link. So that's like a, I don't know, maybe you want to add the, times that you, your concerts are for Christmas and you've just got those somewhere and stick 'em in and that's it.
You can forget about that rather than having to worry about sinking it. I do the. The idea of the, ICS one though, and I, think the primary reason that I like it is those UIs are so ridiculously quick to work
[00:35:27] Jonathan Jernigan: Yep.
Yep.
[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: case, I've got, on my Mac, I've got a button in the, I don't even know what it's called.
You know that bar on the top of the Mac that never goes with the clock. I've got a little button in there which invokes my Google calendar. It just sticks it straight in front of my face. And then you click into the day, month, whatever it is, and then you immediately start typing. And there's not even a kind of.
You don't even have to do anything. It's just super straightforward. And so really it's a time saving exercise. Those things are set up to, to create those events really, quickly, and then you don't even have to worry from that moment on, you just know that a minute or two later, it's gonna somehow magically appear on your website.
So it feels like a just a big time saver.
[00:36:09] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah, so quite a few different things. I totally agree on the ui, like Google Calendar specifically. It's so easy to, get an event set up in, 30 seconds. They've got us beat on that front, but the fact that. It's it, the, other big thing about that too is for cases where you wanna give somebody the ability to add or edit events on their site, but they, for whatever reason, don't need to touch WordPress at all.
What, we discovered was that there are quite a few agencies and one who's a good friend of mine that they focus on restaurants and these restaurant clients basically should not touch their WordPress site. Like they're so non-tech that they just, they, don't even have a login to this site and.
But they do change their specials. One of 'em is a Mexican restaurant that changes their special every single day throughout the entire month. And so right now, this particular agency, they're trying, they have to get a list at the beginning of the month and go manually add all 30, 31 depending on how many, months of the days of the month there are.
Whereas now. They already have the Google calendar with those events, they just simply drop the link into PI calendar and they just appear. so that was a, thing that of course makes sense, but I didn't anticipate initially was just that. So if you don't want your client to touch the site, they can still update their events and you don't have to embed an ugly Google Calendar, for
[00:37:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and you get this sort of like ripple effect of permissions as well. So I don't know. Let's say that in my imaginary, gig venue, I've got four or five people shared into that calendar and I've, given them the permission to create and delete events. They can all just get on and do their thing just inside a Google calendar, and nobody needs to communicate beyond that.
It's just add, it to the Google calendar and it'll appear on the website straight away. Oh, okay.
[00:38:00] Jonathan Jernigan: such a good point. I didn't even consider their permissions
[00:38:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because you can, just ripple that out across the whole organization in one click and all of a sudden you are, I don't know, 20 employees have got the same thing going on. but in the case of an ICS feed, like that one, the non Eventbrite one, presumably that just sticks the event onto the website.
There's no kind of button to go anywhere at that point. 'cause it's just a display thing or is there
[00:38:24] Jonathan Jernigan: right there is, really nowhere to go 'cause it's just a display. and so that's just, that's a trade off. But in that case, if you're using Google. Google calendar anyway. You don't really have much beyond the just description to do. There's no send them to a third party URL with this field that doesn't exist in any of those products.
So it really is just a display
[00:38:44] Nathan Wrigley: In inside of the description for Google Calendar events, can you embed links? I know that's a bit of a weird one, but I, I don't know if you can put links inside of there and if, you can, I wonder if they would map over to, to, pi, the Pi Cal calendar as well. That'd be an interesting one.
'cause you, could smuggle in some links in that way, maybe.
[00:39:05] Jonathan Jernigan: you definitely could. And it looks like you can add
[00:39:07] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you just tried it. Okay.
[00:39:08] Jonathan Jernigan: which is great. Yeah, I just happened to take a
[00:39:10] Nathan Wrigley: That's a curious side effect of, there you go. I've just added a line item to your, to your promotional materials. yeah. Yeah. you could end up, you could link to some part of your own website.
Then in effect, you've created an internal link. anyway, there you go. There was just some random
[00:39:30] Jonathan Jernigan: a good
[00:39:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There
[00:39:31] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah. I was gonna mention as well, the other cool thing that, that we did with the ICS was that. You it, it periodically fetches the most updated, results from that, that ICS feed that you give it. And, we've, we set up the ability to choose how often you want
[00:39:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice.
[00:39:50] Jonathan Jernigan: to fetch.
So in cases where, I can't imagine why, but you need it to update every single minute you can do that. and then what it does is it updates a local copy of that ICS file on your site. So if for whatever reason the connection is broken, your calendar's not empty, it'll just use the most recent version that it had.
Like for right now, CloudFlare is down who knows what side effects that could have on ICS URLs across the internet. that means that if it, can't reach out to that, source, like Google Calendar or whatever, then it's just gonna temporarily use that local file until it can go fetch it
[00:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, okay. That's really interesting. So it's basically caching the results of the, calendar, and it'll use that. I presume it's always using that, but it'll update that in the background. So no matter what happens, if your website is up, there's a file or a, there's a part of the database somewhere which has got that data in it.
Okay. that is good to know because those services. Do from time to time go down. As Jonathan said, it's the, we are recording this in on the 18th of November, 2025, a day that will go down in history, no doubt, because CloudFlare is dead across the entire internet and there's so many weird consequences for that.
And you might be one of the few entities that can ride that out because your WordPress website is, is working unlike mine at the moment. okay.
[00:41:18] Jonathan Jernigan: Our podcast recording app is also functional too, so
[00:41:21] Nathan Wrigley: but curious that is, but almost everything else is broken. okay. I think we probably got to the nitty gritty of all of the new bits and pieces. Is there anything, that we failed to mention that you think is worthy of mention?
[00:41:34] Jonathan Jernigan: the connector add-on specifically is kinda laying the framework for all kinds of other integrations in the future. So everything will be bundled all together in this one connector. So it's a, buy one, get 'em all type deal, and. The, the idea is that everything is in this connector.
It's all separate from the main plugin, keeping everything, lightweight and easy to manage. But we are looking for other suggestions for other event sources. We know that there's tons of other providers like Eventbrite out there and we're looking for. What are the other common use cases like?
like for example, a football club like, a worldwide football, not American football. They have a variety of different programs that they use to manage those schedules for the whole organization. Like perhaps we can tie into those in the future or, those, other integrations we're not thinking about.
We had a guy reach out who asked about an Airtable integration and I thought, oh, that's an
[00:42:31] Nathan Wrigley: that is an interesting one. 'cause you can imagine mapping the fields on an air table. start date, end date, start time. End time description. Yeah, I can actually. That. I think that's a really good one. You should. Or Google Sheets or something. Yeah, I can imagine. Because also that's like that non-technical way of, managing the stuff.
In the same way that Google Calendar is non-technical, you could easily have non-technical people mapping things from a Google sheet or an air tape. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah.
[00:43:01] Jonathan Jernigan: and I, can't even begin to imagine what kind of crazy stuff you could pull off. If your data source was a CSV, like that, there's probably all kinds of crazy witchcraft you could concoct to
[00:43:10] Nathan Wrigley: including, URLs for buttons and things like that to drive people into certain directions. I have a suggestion for you, which would be RSS feeds, like that could be an interesting one. If you could, like for example, podcasting is an RSS feed, and it'd be interesting,
[00:43:25] Jonathan Jernigan: very good
[00:43:25] Nathan Wrigley: carries a lot of that.
It's an XML file basically, and it carries a lot of that data with it. So it can have dates that things are released. And yeah, putting that on a calendar based upon an RSS feed is Anyway, there you go. I've just,
[00:43:39] Jonathan Jernigan: That's the kind of thing we love is those sorts of connections. Like I cal the ICS stuff is based on the I Cal standard, so regardless of what provider, they all follow the same format except Basecamp, which is super annoying because their calendar. Their description, they call it notes, and for whatever reason, they choose not to put notes in the proper description box.
So there are cases like that where just based on the provider doing something wacky, it may not work. But my point is that those sorts of standards are great because RSS is a standard and that allows us to, to tap into it without, like in the, case of Eventbrite, we had to build a whole helper to connect to the API and do all that kind of stuff.
Whereas with these standards, it's much, much more
[00:44:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm presuming that Eventbrite with their API will probably keep that rock solid 'cause they've probably got a load of people polling that all the time. And if they fiddle with it, it'll break horribly for millions of people. okay. So I'll have you back on in a few months time and we will talk about the RSS feed that you've, that you've implemented.
I am not holding you to that, but, Okay. That's great. Thank you for chatting to me about the PI calendar today. where do we find it? Last thing?
[00:44:49] Jonathan Jernigan: pie calendar.com.
[00:44:50] Nathan Wrigley: Easy. That's nice and straightforward. And where do we find you? Do you hang out online in social spaces or not? We had a conversation before we hit record.
Maybe, not. I don't know.
[00:45:02] Jonathan Jernigan: I would say the only, public facing community I, spend really any time at all in is Kyle Van Deen's admin bar. And other than that, I, tend to, spend less time on social media these days, shall we say?
[00:45:18] Nathan Wrigley: other things going on in our lives, haven't we? I, commend you, I commend that to the, the internet in general. but okay. There we go. Thank you Jonathan Jernigan for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it. It.
[00:45:30] Jonathan Jernigan: So glad to be back. Thank you.
[00:45:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got for you today.
Just a quick reminder, wpbuilds.com/black for all of your Black Friday needs. Go check out that page and bookmark. Over 350 deals there at the moment.
And also wpbuilds.com/advertise if you would like to figure out ways to get your product or service into the earphones of our pretty large WordPress specific audience. Go check it out. And if you've got any queries, just email me at [email protected] for any discussions around anything that you might find on that page.
Okay, that's it. That's all I've got for you this week. I'm gonna fade in some cheesy music and say stay safe. You have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
