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Hello, I am working for River Valley Church (http://www.rivervalleychurch.net) and have been given the responsibility of running the website, my knowledge of Joomla is growing but there are still many things I do not know. Other than making sure everything is up to date, my initial project is to place an events calendar on the site, but there is a catch or should I say several.

There are many things we would like the calendar to do the most important is to be able to pull data from our database (Shelby Systems v.5 / MySQL) to fill corresponding fields into a calendar that has categories and events similar to some components such as EventCal, Extcal, and Jevents.

One other concern I have is “If it is possible to do that are there any security issues that could arise having Joomla access our database?”

I am not sure if what I am asking is even possible, but you never know until you ask. Thank you for your time. 

We were looking into something similar, however using an outlook calendar.

I think you will find your solution to be to export your calendar to a google calendar, then using google ical functionality import it into your joomla calendar.

I didnt really pursue this calendar job completely so my details are vague but hopefully it gives you an easy route to explore.

Unless you are using a dedicated server to host your site, you won't be able to do this for security reasons. Even if you did have a dedicated server, it would pose a security risk you wouldn't want to take. There are other complex possibilities to resolve this, but I think it's beyond your means to set this up (it requires an expensive setup and administration, tunneling, etc. which is not for you if you're using Joomla). Your best bet is just to do a monthly import of your new items (using phpmyadmin or whatever). It's a pain, but there really isn't another way around it.