Have you ever wondered how people determine the notation for different versions of their products? It can be frustrating if you don’t understand this process and even more so when companies do it differently. For example, WordPress doesn’t follow the guidelines that we do, so 3.7 for them means something completely different than what it means for us. Allow me to explain why.

Our Versioning System

As a general practice, version numbers for The Events Calendar, Events Calendar PRO and our other add-ons follows the Semantic Versioning guidelines whenever possible. This means releases will maintain a three-part version number: major version; minor version; and patch. So, let’s say we’re looking at Events 3.2 as an example:

If we then deployed a follow-up maintenance build that addressed a few small bugs, and called it 3.2.1, we’d now have:

Make sense?

This is a pretty straight forward system that quickly communicates where we are in the life cycle of a product. With each minor version or patch the second and third numbers will change but the major version number will remain the same. That number will only change when a new major version is released.

When You Update: The First 2 Numbers Should Match

We’re also using this notation system to help you know when you need to update your various Events Calendar add-ons in proper sync as well. If you’re running multiple plugins, like PRO and Community Events – the first 2 numbers are always going to need to match. So PRO 3.2.1 and Community 3.2.6 will play nice together. PRO 3.2.1 and Community 3.0 will not. If we release a dot version (x.x) – that means that changes to the code affect the other plugins in the suite, and they’ll need to be updated as well.

How This Impacts You

In previous code cycles, we kept all numbers identical. So Core & Pro would need to match all the way down – 2.0.4 & 2.0.4. This meant that we were often releasing a new ‘version’ of the plugin that may not include a single new character of code – it was solely released to keep the numbers in sync. If you’re just clicking update in the admin – that’s not a big deal. But if you’re first doing updates on a staging site, testing, then releasing to production (like you all should be doing 🙂 ) then it’s kind of a pain. This new version lets us patch each individual plugin, and only do releases when actually necessary.

Now when you get alerted for an update to your Events Calendar or add-on you’ll know exactly what those numbers mean and whether the update is a minor version or just a patch.