Ux Calendar Link Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Feature: "Add to calendar" on event surfaces. Enables one-click save for Google, Apple, Outlook/Office 365 and Yahoo, plus a downloadable .ics, across webinar landing pages, launch/announcement pages, onboarding "book a demo" confirmations, and transactional emails — without commissioning a bespoke ICS generator.
• Build vs buy. This is the "buy" (adopt) option in the recurring build-vs-adopt debate over calendar export. Replaces an in-house ICS/VTIMEZONE implementation whose edge cases (timezone blocks, UTC offsets, DST boundaries) are exactly where teams lose days of engineering time and still ship malformed files.
• Roadmap scoping. Lets you scope calendar export as a small increment rather than a workstream, freeing the roadmap for higher-leverage items. Also clarifies the boundary: this is export only — it does not cover RSVP, attendee lists, recurrence rules, calendar sync, or scheduling. Those remain separate roadmap decisions (hosted scheduling vendor vs. calendar API).
• Go-to-market use cases. Event/webinar registration flows, product launch and release announcements, partner/co-marketing pages, customer-facing "save the date" emails — all high-visibility, low-complexity surfaces where a missing or broken calendar file is a visible quality defect.
• Quality/risk decisions. The v3.6.0 fix (UTC detection for VTIMEZONE, #4055) is a signal that timezone output has had correctness defects in the recent past. That argues for pinning to ^3.6, validating generated files against Apple Calendar and Outlook before launch, and keeping a regression test on emitted .ics — a small, explicit quality bar rather than an assumption.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt when:

• You need straightforward add-to-calendar links and .ics download on web pages or HTML emails, with a small number of distinct events.
• Your stack is PHP and you want a dependency-light, MIT-licensed library with no external service, no OAuth, and no per-event API calls.
• You emit events in multiple timezones — particularly UTC-defined events for distributed/webinar audiences — and want the timezone block handled rather than hand-rolled.
• You can absorb light integration work in Laravel: the CalendarLink core is plain PHP and usable, but this is a Symfony UX package — there is no Laravel service provider, auto-discovery, or Blade directive, and the Twig extension is not usable from Blade. Budget a thin wrapper plus a Blade partial.

Look elsewhere when:

• You need invitations with attendees/RSVP, RRULE recurrence, or two-way calendar sync — this package deliberately does not do that; use a calendar API or hosted scheduling vendor.
• You want a Laravel-native, batteries-included package with maintained Blade components; a first-party Laravel library or a simple in-house helper may be less friction than bridging Symfony UX.
• You require guaranteed client compatibility at scale across a long tail of clients; a commercial ICS library with a support contract may be the safer procurement.
• You cannot accept framework-coupling risk: adopting a Symfony UX component in a Laravel codebase creates a small but permanent cross-framework dependency to track across major versions.

Version note: treat v3.6.0 as the floor (^3.6). If your events are defined in UTC, earlier versions may have produced incorrect VTIMEZONE output; verify one generated file per event timezone in Apple Calendar and Outlook before rollout.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives (one paragraph): We can ship "add to calendar" across our event pages and lifecycle emails with roughly a day of engineering instead of a multi-week build, using a small, permissively licensed, no-vendor-lock-in PHP library. It removes a class of bugs we would otherwise own — calendar files that open incorrectly in Outlook or Apple Calendar — and it costs nothing per event. The latest release fixes a timezone-detection defect, so we would adopt at that version and add one automated check on the generated file. This is a low-risk, low-cost quality win on customer-facing surfaces; the only caveat is that it handles export only, so RSVP and scheduling stay separate roadmap items.

For engineering (summary): symfony/ux-calendar-link v3.6.0 — patch release containing one bugfix (#4055, UTC detection for VTIMEZONE). No breaking changes, no deprecations, no new features; a safe in-range upgrade. The core CalendarLink generator is framework-agnostic PHP and drops into a Laravel app cleanly; the Symfony/Twig packaging does not, so we bind the class in a service provider and render links from a Blade partial. Pin ^3.6 for the timezone fix, add a snapshot/unit test asserting the .ics output for a UTC event and a non-UTC event, and manually verify both in Apple Calendar and Outlook once. Expect the integration surface to stay roughly one file.