Programmatic Connections

Drupal 9 Importer Module

Stanford Web Services has released a new events importer module for use with Drupal 9 websites on the Stanford Sites platform. This new version of the module only works with Drupal 9 sites and pulls specifically from the new Events Calendar. Documentation for this tool is available here.

It’s important to note that Localist is the source of truth for your event, with the exception of any extra fields or metadata you add on your Drupal site. If you change event content in Drupal, it will be overwritten the next time your event is synced from Localist.

A Note for Drupal 7 Users

To avoid breaking D7 sites, we are going to leave the legacy system up and running for a minimum of six months. You’ll have to make one change to avoid breakage: instead of referencing your feed at events.stanford.edu, you’ll use events-legacy.stanford.edu.

This will work in the short term. Keep in mind that we are replacing the legacy system in part because it is undocumented and extremely difficult to fix if it breaks, so we’re advising everyone to start looking at new solutions as quickly as possible. In our opinion, your best course of action is to accelerate any planned migration to Drupal 9. We understand this can be a large project and could be in your queue behind other, higher priority work.

Something to keep in mind if you continue pulling from legacy: if your feed includes events entered by other organizations, and those organizations have moved to Localist, their events will not show in your XML feed. We are not syncing events from Localist back to the legacy system.

Localist API

Localist’s read-only API offers the most modern, powerful way to pull Events Calendar data to another site. Data is delivered in JSON format and can include all event data or a subset of your choosing. A brief overview of the Localist API is available on their support site. Full documentation is on their developer site.

CSV/XLS Import to Localist

If you prefer to add a quarter’s or a year’s worth of events at once, you can do so via Localist’s bulk upload. Accessing this feature requires Platform Admin access, so the Events Calendar team will work with you on this. Submit a help ticket to get started.

Continuous CSV Upload

The Events Calendar team can also work with you to pull your events from a .csv – in order to do so, your CSV file must be internet-accessible and at a fixed address. These feeds are only updated once per day during the overnight hours. You can research this method at the bottom of Localist’s bulk add instructions page.