What We’re Coding This Week
Because it’s been a few days since our last update, I thought it’d be worthwhile to share an update covering what we’re focused on this week — we’re revving at full throttle on a number of fronts and are simultaneously tackling new 2.0 features and working out a few bugs in the 1.3.2 code. Check out the specifics after the jump.
Events Calendar Pro 2.0
As any of our wonderful beta testers can attest, the infrastructure for ECP 2.0 is in place and the recurrence functionality is — barring a few minor clean-up items here and there — pretty much complete. Our efforts have now shifted to smoothing out the integration with 3rd party add-ons and improving the core base as a whole so it’s dramatically overhauled for the 2.0 release.
On the code side this week, our developer is jumping into tasks such as:
- A substantial templating system upgrade that allows site admins to choose a
page template to control the look and feel of your calendar (screenshot at right) - Implementing an Ajax loader to the calendar
- Renaming core classes, functions and template tags have a consistent namespace by appending “Tribe” to the front.
- Adding “Create Event,” “Update Event” & “Delete Event” functions to lib/tribe-event-api-class.php
page template to control the look and feel of your calendar (screenshot at right)Also worth noting is that we’ve changed how the plugin itself is packaged. Previously, Events Calendar Pro and The Events Calendar were two entirely separate standalone plugins with a large amount of duplicate code — one premium, the other free — that could not be activated simultaneously on a site.
Now, ECP 2.0 and The Events Calendar will share a common code base. ECP itself is going to be an add-on to the open source code, enabling new features.
Without that second Premium plugin activated, the system will treat you as a free (non-premium) user and thus will limit your functionality accordingly. And without The Events Calendar activated first, attempting to do so for Events Calendar Pro – Premium will yield an error message.
We’ll be kicking off another 2.0 beta on September 5 — just under 2 weeks from now. If you’re interested in participating and promise to provide meaningful feedback, make sure you’re signed up for our newsletter above and are a fan of our Facebook page so you receive the announcement when it’s sent around. Note that the beta will be limited to 12 participants and will end on September 14.
Events Calendar Pro 1.3.3
Sure, we’ve been focused on ECP 2.0 lately. But that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about our 1.3.2 users. By the end of this week, we’ll have a slight update — Events Calendar Pro 1.3.3 — up at CodeCanyon. The update will be minor but will fix a somewhat critical error that emerged in 1.3.2, where past events from the current month do not appear in grid view by default.
In addition, a bug recently came to our attention that kept the system from saving event venue details when only limited data (ie just city, state and country) was added when setting up the event on the backend. A fix for this, reverting back to allowing location data to be saved regardless of how complete or incomplete it may be, will be the other major focus of this release.
We’ll post an announcement here and on Twitter/Facebook once that update has been approved and hits the store. As always, it will be a free upgrade for existing ECP owners. And it is likely that — barring the introduction of any new bugs in this release — 1.3.3 will be the final Events Calendar release until 2.0 comes out next month.
Anyone who can’t wait for the code should head over to the forum, get verified and send me a private message asking for it. At the time of writing, the past events on grid view issue has been resolved and if you request the updated code it will work upon activation. (The disappearing location data is still being worked on).
Questions? Comments? Complaints? Feel free to leave them in the comments below, or at our Facebook wall. We’ll have another update on where we are with 2.0 later this week, hopefully providing a glimpse of it’s integration with Eventbrite Tickets Pro (recently rechristened from Events Tickets Pro) along the way. Stay tuned.