The Events Calendar & WordPress 4.4+

If you’ve been keeping up with our blog posts of late, you may have noticed an extra addition to our notes for last week’s maintenance release: WordPress 4.5 is now the minimum officially supported WordPress version for The Events Calendar, Events Calendar PRO, Event Tickets, Community Events, and GigPress. A minimum WordPress version of 4.4 or higher is now required for Filter Bar, as well.

You’ll see this change being applied to our other free and premium plugins in the coming weeks.

Why the Change?

For quite some time now, we’ve supported older versions of WordPress dating as far back as version 3.9, which was originally released in April of 2014. In software development terms, three years represents a considerable span of time, and we’ve seen quite a few significant releases from the WordPress community since! Adjusting our expectations for a minimum supported version of WordPress comes with a number of benefits for not just our development team, but for our user community as a whole.

Greater Stability

Keeping your site current with recent WordPress updates will provide you with access to important fixes and security improvements from the open-source WordPress community. These changes help to keep your site running smoothly and afford extra protection from hacks and exploits, so they’re definitely worth considering for all users.

Improved Compatibility

Moving to a minimum supported WordPress version of 4.5 keeps The Events Calendar and its related plugins in step with other popular plugin offerings, such as WooCommerce (which carries a minimum requirement of version 4.4) and Jetpack (which requires at least WordPress 4.7).

Keeping your WordPress install up to date ensures that you’ll have access to the latest and greatest versions of all of these plugins as they become available. And while compatibility between plugins isn’t always a sure thing, you’re more likely to have a smooth experience with plugins targeted for the same or similar WordPress versions.

Sharpened Support

Reducing the number of versions that we support allows us to better target our efforts when users report issues in our forums. By moving to a more recent version of WordPress, you’ll be joining the largest portion of our user base on a more stable platform – and you’ll reap the benefits in the form of better, more focused support from our team.

Resource Efficiency

Focusing our development efforts towards more recent versions of WordPress frees up development and QA resources that would otherwise be spent ensuring broad compatibility with outdated software. This means that more of our efforts can be applied to improvements that matter to you, like bug fixes and feature additions.

Who’s Affected?

If you’re already running our plugins on a WordPress version of 4.5 or newer, you can rest easy regarding these changes. Users of current WordPress architectures who are moving to the latest versions of our plugins shouldn’t notice any differences in our update or installation processes.

Any users remaining on older WordPress platforms will see an incompatibility notice when attempting to install the latest version of The Events Calendar, Event Tickets, or GigPress from the WordPress plugin directory.

Versions of our plugins that require WordPress 4.4 or above can still generally be installed on earlier versions of WordPress. However, please be aware that problems may result that our support team would be unable to assist with.

We hope this post helps to clarify our thinking in reaching this decision. We truly believe this move represents a positive step forward for our continued development efforts as well as the needs of our user base.

With these changes in place, we’ll be better equipped to focus our efforts where they count: on crafting solid code and implementing great new features to make your projects even better.

On behalf of all of us on the team, thanks so much for your continued support!