A look at what’s coming in our 4.2 release

The Events Calendar 4.2 is just around the corner and we’re packing in some pretty awesome features that we can’t wait to get into your hands. It’s hard for us to keep quiet about what’s coming, so here’s a sneak peak into the things we’re most excited about in this release.

oEmbed for Events

You know that handy little thing in WordPress where you paste a YouTube URL into the post editor and the video auto-magically embeds itself? Well, we’re doing the exact same thing for events!

This new feature will allow you to take the URL for any of your events, paste it into WordPress content editor, and display your event in record time.

Registered Attendees can manage their information

Event Tickets is great. You create RSVPs. People RSVP. Then the event happens.

But what if your guests want to change their RSVP prior to the event? You could “refund” someone’s RSVP or ticket reservation manually, but that’s a royal pain. This new feature will allow those who have registered for your event to edit and update their RSVP and ticket information, including:

• RSVP status. If someone has previously RSVP’d for your event, they can now log in and change that status from “Going” to “Not Going” on the fly.
• Registration information. We recently rolled out a feature for requesting additional information from a guest during registration. Now, guests can edit that information after it has been recorded!

We’re very excited about this one because we can already hear the sound of event coordinators, administrators and promoters rejoicing.

Import events with ease

Our CSV Importer is a simple, quick way to import a ton of event data into your calendar in bulk. While it is not a new feature in and of itself, we have rolled some new capabilities into it that will make importing events even nicer.

For example, the CSV Importer will now remember your previously imported fields and will offer them as options the next time you do an import. We know that having to reset those on every import was a tedious task and now this will cut some time and effort on the process.

What, you want another example? Well, the big news is this: tickets and RSVPs are now supported! That’s right: you will finally be able to import tickets to your existing events without having to manually re-create them.

Accessibility for the win

Making The Events Calendar more accessible to those with disabilities (no matter what they are) is something that’s always in the back of our minds when coming up with new features or refining older ones. In this release, we’ve made a number of updates that improve the overall experience of the calendar for just this reason:

• Focus styles on calendar search fields. The way we present a fields that is in focus will now be much more prominent and easy to spot than it was in past versions.

• Navigational improvements. The pagination between past and upcoming events will employ clearly defined ARIA labels for much greater ease in navigating the calendar.

Wrapping Up

We sure hope you’re as excited as we are about what’s ahead for The Events Calendar, Event Tickets and our entire suite of premium plugins. Our sleeves are rolled up as we put the finishing touches on these and we cannot wait to release them.