March madness basketball schedule

Thanks to the super awesome Google Calendar Events plugin for WordPress by Ross Hanney, creating a this beautiful NCAA basketball game schedule took only five minutes. Beyond displaying game info, this it also demonstrates how easy it can be to display pubic Google calendar events with your own CSS flair in WordPress:

NCAA March Madness Game Schedule (click HERE for 2013 March Madness Schedule)

   June  2013 »
MTWTFSS
 12
3456789
1011121314
  • Flag Day

    Starts: 12:00 am

    Ends: 12:00 am, June 15, 2013

1516
  • Father's Day

    Starts: 12:00 am

    Ends: 12:00 am, June 17, 2013

17181920212223
24252627282930

If you have a Gmail, you already have a Google calendar. Just create a publicly shared calendar within Google Calendar to use the Google Calendar Events (GCE) plugin with WordPress. For the purposes of this article, I have created my own public Google calendar and imported the March Madness Basketball events into it. I also installed the GCE plugin for WordPress and configured it to use that shared Google Calendar.

Here’s how you can do it:

[step 1] Publicly share a Google Calendar and note down the URL of the XML feed.

[step 2] Install the GCE plugin for WordPress.

[step 3] Configure the GCE plugin.

  1. Click Settings -> Google Calendar Events.
  2. Click Add Feed.
  3. Paste the URL to your public Google Calendar feed into the Feed field (the video shows you how to get it), set any feed related preferences and click Save.
  4. On any page or post use the following shortcode to embed a GCE calendar.
    ([)google-calendar-events id="1" type="ajax"(])
  5. Alternatively you can create a GCE widget and display it in the widget area of your theme.

That’s it.

10 Responses So Far... Leave a Reply:

  1. ben says:

    Is there a way I can import this calendar into my own googlecalendar?

    • Absolutely! Here is the ZIP file containing the 2011 ICS calendar file.

      • You can download the ZIP and extract it to your desktop.
      • Then to import the ICS file (which is inside the zip) to your own Google calendar, click the Add link in the left hand column (right underneath the US Holidays calendar in the Other calendars section).
      • Then click Import calendar and choose the ICS file you just downloaded to your desktop. Boom, Done!
      • Alternatively you can also add the ICS file to Outlook or iCalendar if you don’t use Google Calendar

      Hope that helps.

  2. [...] calendar that displays events from your maintained shared GC: [step 1] Watch the video in my previous GCE post to find out how to share a GC and import existing events into it. Copy the link to your GC feed to [...]

  3. B. Walden says:

    Is there a ZIP for 2012?

  4. Will says:

    2013 March Madness calendar ready???