Adding Podio Tasks to Thunderbird

Podio offers a few ways to integrate your calendar with outside systems, and one of them is the standard iCal format.

I use this extensively in Thunderbird with the Lightning plugin to show my Podio appointments and boardroom availability in my calendar.

However, what I find quite annoying is that my tasks are in the calendar as events, and not in with my tasks in Thunderbird.

The reason is that the iCal feed from Podio exports tasks as VEVENTs instead of VTOTOs.

I reached out to Podio's support team, and they explained that the reason for this is because Google doesn't support VTODOs in their calendar, so tasks would be lost.

After more digging, I also found out that Outlook doesn't support VTODO's in their remote calendar integration.

What's the point of having open standards if no-one follows them?

Anyway, to make a long story short, I wanted to get my Podio tasks to show up in Thunderbird as tasks, and not calendar events.

Here is a little PHP script that accomplishes this.

1. Get the PHP Podio iCal Task Conversion script

2. Copy it to your website hosting account

3. Configure the script with the iCal feed address from Podio (see Adding the Podio calendar to other calendars)

4. Add a new calendar to Thunderbird using your script address as the iCalendar feed address

Please note that this script comes without any warranties. Use it at your own risk. I know it works because we use it, but we can't be held liable if something breaks.

Please post something nice on your website / blog and link back to this page if you find this script useful.

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by Andreas Huttenrauch
Owner of Globi Web Solutions, and Podio Fanatic.

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