Easy ICS Embedding / Parsing?

My experience: hacking around with other people’s PHP / WP Plugins and CSS, HTML hand-coding, all-nighters and how to fight bears.

So, Myself and the keys player from my Ceilidh band are putting together an iPhone webapp to better deal with the leads, quotes and confirmed gigs for the band.

We currently have a version of this working OK, and my main responsibility is the ‘confirmed’ section. Currently I have this using Google Calendar’s output with the HTML embed configuration, which means an IFrame (yuck) and no control over tweaking the CSS and layout of the calendar output.

You can see this working here . It’s good in the mean time but here’s where I hit issues.

I’ve been looking for a tutorial on using the .ICS output from GCal and parsing it with PHP so that I can use the data in whatever layout and style I want to. Problem is none of my googling has been successful and I don’t know where to start. So my question is has anyone dealt with this kind of thing before and do you know of a simple parser with a human-readable guide to how it works?

A sub-question would be how easy is it to port a Wordpress plugin for use with a normal site, as this plugin looked useful but I’m not convinced I should use a whole WP install just to get to use a plugin!

Thanks in advance.