Coming Soon: The Events Calendar Redesign

It’s hard to believe, but The Events Calendar is coming up on its 10-year anniversary. That’s nearly a decade of building and maintaining WordPress event management plugins that are used the world over. In fact, our plugins now power more than 700,000 calendars around the globe.

As the Product Owner for The Events Calendar, I can speak for our whole team when I say we’re proud to be the go-to calendar solution for WordPress users. But we don’t just want to rest on our laurels—we’re always striving to improve and to meet our users’ evolving needs.

That’s exactly why we decided to embark on a major design overhaul of The Events Calendar this year. We’re excited to announce that in the coming months, we’ll be releasing a new-and-improved look for The Events Calendar.

The newly redesigned month view (foreground) and the existing design (background)

This refreshed look will feature a sleek new design for each of our views (list, month, day, week, photo, and map). We’ve also made major improvements to mobile views, added a new style for featured events, and addressed a number of known user pain points. Stay tuned to our blog, or sign up for our newsletter to learn more about our calendar views redesign as we get closer to launch.

Virtual Event in a Box

So, why did we decide to refresh The Events Calendar? Why now? What drove our design decisions? What else can you expect to see from us in the next few months? Just how many developers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

On behalf of The Events Calendar team, I took a minute to answer those questions and get into the nitty-gritty of why we decided to launch a new look for the plugin.

Why a new design for The Events Calendar? Why now?

When The Events Calendar first launched way back in 2009, designers and developers often customized their calendars to achieve the look they wanted. Over the years, our team has seen tons of gorgeous calendars customized by our users, and those custom calendars have been an inspiration to us.

Why don’t we make it possible for everyone to have a great-looking calendar right out of the box?

As our user base grew, more and more people opted to use The Events Calendar right out of the box, without additional tinkering or customization. And that makes perfect sense—not everybody has the skill set to customize their calendar, or the budget or desire to hire a designer.

This got us thinking: Why don’t we make it possible for everyone to have a great-looking calendar right out of the box? While customization has always been a cornerstone of The Events Calendar, and it always will be, we also want a beautiful, user-friendly calendar that’s available to everyone, whether they’re a serious developer or a novice designer.

Around this same time, our support team also started getting requests from customers for specific design and UX upgrades. Not long thereafter, we added a few new faces to our design team and design became a central focus of our work. By 2019, we were ready to get to work on overhauling the look of the calendar views on The Events Calendar.

How did you decide which features to focus on in the redesign? What drove the direction for the new look?

User feedback drove all of our decisions throughout the redesign, from deciding which features to prioritize to creating the overall look and feel of the new calendar.

To start, our team knew these updates needed to address a few common pain points for our users. One of those issues was multi-day events in the monthly calendar view. In the new-and-improved view, these events show as a single event spanning multiple days, rather than a recurring event that repeats each day.

User feedback drove all of our decisions throughout the redesign, from deciding which features to prioritize to creating the overall look and feel of the new calendar.

We also spruced up photo view so that each event card has a consistent fixed height. Another big update: We reworked map view so that every Events Calendar PRO user can have a beautiful, functional map, whether or not they have access to a premium Google Maps API Key. We took care to apply the new design across every piece of The Events Calendar. No matter which view you use, everything looks clean, cohesive, and polished.

A peek at The Events Calendar’s new photo view.

Beyond the functional improvements, the design team also dedicated a lot of energy to giving The Events Calendar a modern, refreshed look. The last major update to the design of The Events Calendar was in 2013; it was time for a makeover.

The new, elevated aesthetic is design-forward, but still flexible enough to blend in with any website. The clean, minimal calendar looks great upon install, without any customizations whatsoever. But fear not—The Events Calendar is still totally customizable for users who want to add their own flair.

We reworked map view so that every Events Calendar PRO user will have a beautiful, functional map, whether or not they have access to a premium Google Maps API Key.

What else is cookin’ in The Events Calendar kitchen?

The team is excited to launch this redesign in the coming months, but our work is far from over. We’re also making progress on improvements to our recurring events functionality. For users with lots of events, we’re currently testing upgrades that will noticeably improve your calendar’s speed and performance.

We’re also working on some cool new features for Event Tickets and Event Tickets Plus. We can’t get into specifics quite yet, but as soon as we have info to share, we’ll post here on the blog and let you know via the newsletter. (Psst: You can sign up for our newsletter below if you’re not already subscribed!)

Finally, we’re gearing up to release even more enhancements to our newly released email marketing tool, Promoter. Stay tuned to learn about the upcoming features that will make it even easier for you to run automated email marketing for your events.

In the meantime, thank you for your continued support of The Events Calendar, and stay tuned for updates as we get into beta testing for our calendar views redesign!