I’ve been in the midst of heavy development on My Calendar version 3.0 since November 2017. The new release incorporates extensive changes that improve the user experience & offer some long-desired features. Some of these changes are significant enough that I’ve been holding the release for some time while I get people to install the plug-in and test. Release is now imminent, so here’s what to expect!

Among the more significant changes:

Support for multiple categories

Since the beginning, My Calendar has only supported one category for an event. This has been limiting, but because of the way category filters were written, it’s been a challenge to update. In this version, My Calendar finally adds support for multiple categories! This includes a rewrite to most of the event queries, so keep your eyes open for situations where the calendar shows events that aren’t what you were expecting.

New Stylesheet & CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) Variables

I haven’t published a new stylesheet for My Calendar since 2015, so it was long overdue. The new stylesheet streamlines a number of display elements, and incorporates CSS Variables to set colors throughout the interface. Along with the new stylesheet, I’ve added an interface to set and add new CSS variables for use in your stylesheets. The variables aren’t in use in older stylesheets, but could be added!

Schema.org Markup

Events now use address & event markup to provide richer semantic data about your events.

Converted pop-up into a modal

The pop-up event details now constrains tabbing to remain within the model and allows you to close and exit using the esc key.

Replaced iCal feeds with new links

The links provided for iCal download have always been limited. You had to choose whether you wanted the time formats set for Google or Outlook imports, and they weren’t true subscription feeds, as they only displayed the events for the current view. The new feeds are feeds of all new events added, so that people can subscribe to your calendar and get ongoing updates of new events. This also incorporated a host of additional refinements and improvements to iCal exports.

Changed “approved” to “draft”

My Calendar events have had published and unpublished states for a long time. The language this used was to indicate that events were either “approved” or “published”.

If you wanted to create a draft of an event and you were an administrator, you had to go through a complicated process to create the event in an unapproved state, and carefully avoid approving it by accident. Now, the concept of “approved” has been replaced by more intuitive and WordPress-standard methods for labeling events as “draft” or “published”, as well as offering users the option to save events as drafts until they’re ready to publish.

Moved development to GitHub

With this release, I’ve moved all My Calendar development to GitHub. Contribute, comment, and follow development of My Calendar in the My Calendar repository!