One of the core features of the Google Calendar Pro addon is enabling the display of private events in your calendar. A question one may ask is “As soon as I add a calendar to a website, doesn’t the previously private calendar automatically become public? What is this feature actually about?”
This is a valid concern.
To clarify, the Simple Calendar plugin allows you to display events from Google Calendars on your WordPress website. The visibility of private events in the calendar depends on whether you are using the free Simple Calendar plugin only or alongside the Google Calendar Pro add‑on.
Simple Calendar (Free Version)
When using the free version of Simple Calendar, Google Calendar visibility settings are required. For events to be displayed in the calendar that you set in your website, the following requirements have to be met:
- The Google Calendar whose events you want to display in your website calendar must be set to public
- The events in the Google calendar need to be public
As a result, only calendars and events that are publicly accessible can be displayed. This, however, does have bring in a few concerns.
Implications of Public Google Calendars
Setting your Google calendar to public means that:
- Your Google Calendar will be publicly accessible to anyone who has a link to it
- The Google calendar can be crawled and indexed by search engines, which may expose sensitive information and lead to privacy concerns.
Google Calendar Pro Add‑on
The Google Calendar Pro add-on removes the need to make your calendar public.
With the add-on installed:
- Your Google Calendar does not need to be set to public
- Private events can be displayed on your website
The add-on connects securely to Google via the Google API using authorized authentication. This allows Simple Calendar to retrieve calendar data directly from your Google account. As a result, both public and private events can be rendered within your website calendar.
Key Advantage
The primary benefit of Google Calendar Pro is improved privacy control. You can display private events on your website without exposing the Google Calendar itself publicly. This enables you to maintain your preferred Google Calendar privacy settings while still presenting calendar data on your site.