Hi, we are trying to figure out the best way to automate our community events collection and posting. There are several community groups we monitor / subscribe to; their announcements and emails come in all sorts of formats - effectively there is no actual pattern to the wording/syntax of how events are announced. Probably just like any other community. Some put their events on google calendar / iCal, so that's easy, but most do not.
Basically this is the general flow we're thinking of:
1) subscribe an 'automatic-recipient' account to these community announcement lists (Mailhandler module?)
2) write some custom script to read the received emails and try to parse event details, much like 'Quick Add' on Google Calendar which seems to do a nice job
3) automatically generate an UNpublished node with the automated event details from #2 (Feeds module?)
4) then automatically send an email notice to the admin (Rules module?) to say "Here's the email announcement from group X that I just received, and, here's the event info that I think I parsed from it; please confirm by publishing the node manually, or, edit the node then publish it manually."
The biggest question is probably the script for #2 - this might be a heavily customized parser for the Feeds module, or, it might be something that's already available, paid or otherwise? Doesn't seem like it would be that hard to write... he says...
We can probably get 1) and 3) and 4) working, though it would be great to hear from anyone who has experience with something like this.
Thanks