Your scares me

[Stephan]

Hi guys,

I received your two mails concerning the coming big update.
For me this sounds kind of fate-charged and that scares me.

Im running The Events Calender and the community plugin and i am very happy with it.
It tooked me weeks to customize the event submission-form as i need it.

I’m not very talented in administrating websites and i dont have any skills in programming.
Now i am afraid that the big update to 3.10 could break my site or that i loose my events, or so on.

Is it kind of dangerous to update to 3.10? To me that sounds like that. “Make backups, try it on a test-system, read carefully….” worrying!

Is it for a normal wordpress-newbie safe to update or should i left everything as it is…?
Cant i just press the update-button with peace of mind?

Would be nice if you could calm me down – you great calender is the most important part of my website. I cant and i dont want to risk its integrity.

Sorry for my bad english

Kind regards

Stephan

[Barry]

Hi Stephan,

I’m sorry that our emails alarmed you and hopefully I can allay some of your concerns.

A set of much-needed changes will be shipping with the upcoming release and what we wanted to do with our recent emails was simply to keep users like you informed – and give you the advance notice needed to prepare.

It isn’t a foregone conclusion that you will actually need to make any changes: for many if not most users we expect the update will be seamless. However, the plugin naturally needs to change over time in order to improve and for bugs to be fixed. Consequently, there is an increased possibility that those users who have customized things may need to make some adjustments to their work.

This is one of the reasons that we have decided to provide access to release candidates, which are “preview releases” you can take for a spin before the official update ships.

If you want to access these, please simply visit the Account → Downloads page.

Remember also that, while we naturally recommend you keep things up-to-date, you don’t have to update the very instant our next release becomes available: you are free to make the updates at your own pace.

Is it kind of dangerous to update to 3.10? To me that sounds like that. “Make backups, try it on a test-system, read carefully….” worrying!

No – it should not be dangerous.

Again, we do anticipate that where users have modified specific areas (such as month view tooltips or week view) there may be a need to tune those customizations or revert to the default templates that ship with the plugin until various customizations can be reworked – to learn more, please see this blog post.

Our advice that you backup is really just a reminder of a common best practice: updating WordPress itself, themes or plugins is generally a smooth process – but there’s always potential for unforeseen issues to crop up that are nothing to do with the work we’ve done in this release specifically – and making a backup is nothing more than an easy-to-implement safeguard to protect yourself and provide a means of restoring the site’s previous state.

Similarly, the suggestion to test things out somewhere other than your live site is some helpful advice primarily geared at users who have made customizations and want to see how they fare with the next release before rolling it out on the live site – it’s a sensible precaution we simply wanted to draw attention to.

To sum up, our 3.10 release contains a large number of improvements, fixes and new functionality and we of course want to get those enhancements in the hands of users like yourself with the minimum amount of disruption – but, yes, some work may be required to let specific customizations persist.

If you still have concerns please do let me know – and I’m sorry if we alarmed you unduly.

[Stephan]

Hi Barry,

first of all: Thank you for your friendly and perceptively answer 🙂

Good to know you guys care for a dull dabbler like me 😉

I´ve modified just one thing: The submission form in my community plugin (I added some explanatiosn..)

How could i transfer this to 3.10?

and one more thing: the update sustains/preserves my existing events/locations/venues ?

best regards

Stephan

[Barry]

Hi Stephan,

I´ve modified just one thing: The submission form in my community plugin (I added some explanatiosn..)

So long as you followed the approach recommended by our Themer’s Guide (that is, you copied the templates to your theme directory and modified them there) you should be good 🙂

With that said, some of the default Community Events templates have changed in order to introduce improvements, here’s one example:

• In 3.10, it is possible to customize the “Event” keyword (you might prefer to use “Party”/”Parties” instead of “Event”/”Events”, for instance)
• The revised community/edit-event.php template that will ship with 3.10 respects this setting
• If you modified that same template via an override, your customized version probably will not respect that new setting – but of course that doesn’t mean there will be a “breakage”, merely that you won’t benefit from the update in that particular detail

If you do have doubts and concerns, though, the release candidates are available for you to test with so you can adjust your custom templates accordingly.

However – though I can’t offer any guarantees (since I don’t know exactly what changes you made) – it doesn’t sound like there will be much of a problem in this case.

and one more thing: the update sustains/preserves my existing events/locations/venues ?

Absolutely – and we have tested this extensively ourselves.

Even so, making a backup – and knowing how to restore it – is a sensible precaution to take before any update (and, arguably, should be done routinely).

Good to know you guys care for a dull dabbler like me 😉

We definitely care and work hard to make things as easy as we reasonably can 🙂

[Barry]

Hi!

It’s been a while so I’m going to go ahead and close this topic.

• Need help with anything else? Go right ahead and post a new topic, one of the team will be only too happy to help
• Still need help with this issue and need to re-open it? Again, please simply create a new topic and link to this one to provide the team with some context

Thanks!

[Author]

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