My Calendar 2.5.0 is the first major release on My Calendar in 14 months. That’s an awfully long time to go between major releases. A normal cycle for me is 8 to 10 months – this is a large plug-in, and making major changes is time consuming. But adding an extra 6 months on to this is, well, a lot of time.

There are a number of reasons that this has taken so long – and one of them is reflected in a change I made in this release. I changed the version of WordPress required from version 4.1 to version 4.4. In truth, this plug-in will probably still work just fine in any 4.x version – but I’m no longer officially supporting more than 2 versions back, and this will be true for all my plug-ins moving forward. It makes my life simpler, reduces my testing time, and allows me to use newer functions and methods available in recent versions of WordPress.

One of the major challenges I’ve been posed with in the last year is the ongoing pressures of providing support. I spent a couple hours every day doing support for my various plug-ins, and that only barely allows me to keep up with what I need to do – and significantly reduces the time I can spend on development, since I also have client responsibilities that require my time and attention. My own projects inevitably get pushed to the back burner much of the time.

But enough of that.

What’s going on in My Calendar version 2.5.0?

There are three important breaking changes: I’ve changed a few classes so that structured data is better supported in micrformats. If you were using any of those classes (which is somewhat unlikely), you may see minor changes in how your design is displayed. Second, I’ve eliminated the last two fixed ID attributes: ‘upcoming-events’ and ‘todays-events’, used in their respective widgets. Widgets now have unique ID attributes, and use those same strings as classes.

The main feature changes include:

  1. Restrict permissions to manage events, restricting users to edit only specific categories of events.
  2. You can create custom templates in the template editor for reference in widgets and shortcodes.
  3. You can add additional dates to any event from the event editor. Running a show that’s added an extra weekend? Just add in the extra dates.
  4. New template tag added: {related}, to show a list of other events in the same group.
  5. Multisite improvements: in multisite, you can show events from any site by passing the site ID into shortcodes.

There are many under-the-hood improvements and bug fixes, reviewable in the changelog!