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Event Importer

The Stanford Event Importer takes data from the Stanford Event Calendar feed, and then creates and populates event nodes on your site with the event information.  The event information can come from either a category or an organization on the Stanford Event Calendar. Here's how to put the Stanford Event Importer to work on your site.

Site Owners can create, edit and delete event importers.

Create the Stanford Event Importer and import events

To use the Stanford Event Importer you’ll need to create a Stanford Event Importer node, which will define the events to import.  

Before starting, be sure to have the following information ready:

  • Title of your Event importer
  • Category or Organization from which feed to import.  The Category corresponds to the “By subject” and “By type” items on events.stanford.edu.  Consider visiting events.stanford.edu, and counting approximately the number of items in the feed.  Then, when importing items, compare this number to the number of items imported.

Here’s how to create the event importer:

  1. From the Site Actions Menu select Add Event Importer
  2. Enter the title of your importer.  
  3. Select either a category or organization for your importer 
  4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select “Save”

Upon saving the new event importer, the importer will immediately import the items from the feed.  

Check your results

You may want to make sure that the events imported are the ones you expect:

  1. Select “Manage Content” from the Site Actions Menu
  2. Under “Type” select “Stanford Event”  
  3. Click on “Apply”
  4. If necessary, sort by date by clicking on the “Updated” column header.
  5. Select the most recent event and check that it reflects the information that you expected.  

Updating the importer

Did you forget to add a tag to the events you imported?  Maybe you imported the wrong feed?  Not to worry. Here’s how to update or change the importer and the items you’ve imported:

  1. Find the Stanford Event Importer node you originally used to import the items.  You can do this by selecting “Manage Content” from the Site Actions Menu
  2. Under “Type” select “Stanford Event Importer”
  3. Click on “Apply”
  4. Scroll through the list until you find the importer to update.
  5. Select the importer by clicking on the title
  6. Select the “Delete Items” tab
  7. Click on “Delete” on the confirmation page.
  8. Select “Edit”
  9. Make your changes to the importer
  10. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on “Save” to save your changes.
  11. After saving, import the events with the new criteria by selecting “Import”
  12. Select “Import” on the confirmation page

Verify the import

  1. Verify the number of nodes created corresponds with what you expect
  2. Verify your results as described in the section above under “Check your results”

You may need to clear your cache to see the newly imported nodes.  To do this, select "Clear Site Cache" from the Site Actions Menu.

If you like this module, check out its sister module, Stanford Courses Importer.