I’ve been working on My Calendar 3.3.0 for a solid 9 months, and it’s finally releasing today! This is a major release, and there are quite a lot of accompanying changes.

One change of note is that this is the first release I didn’t work on 100% alone; I hired Paal Joachim Romdahl to help with documentation and testing, for an outside view on usability and logic. Paal’s done a great job, and this is a thoroughly tested product. One of the key outcomes is that the My Calendar documentation is no longer available for sale as a PDF (Portable Document Format); it’s been completely updated in my documentation site for My Calendar.

That’s not to say there’s no possibility of bugs. If you encounter a bug with 3.3.0, don’t hesitate to raise it as an issue in the Github repository for My Calendar. Like I said, this is a major release, and a lot has changed.

What’s New in 3.3.0

Updated Admin Screens

All of the My Calendar admin screens have received a thorough going over, with some large changes and some small. Here are a few of the most significant changes:

  • Event screen offers a grid view as well as list view.
  • More complete parity between normal event editing and group editing.
  • Recurring event input updated
  • New date picker with a better interface and better accessibility.
  • Add new categories during event creation.
  • Updated shortcode builder
  • Combined style, template, and script management into a single ‘Design’ screen.
  • Stylesheet and template tag previews

Front end improvements

As in the admin, there are dozens or even hundreds of minor changes, but here are a few larger changes:

  • New default stylesheet
  • New calendar navigation options, including accessibility features & a location selector
  • Front-end view for locations, including a list of upcoming events at that location.
  • Updated Google Maps integration, including geolocation to get latitude and longitude for locations.
  • Replaced ancient category images with a selection of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) icons (mostly from the Font Awesome collection.)
  • Pretty permalinks enabled by default.
  • Support ld+json event schema.

Developer Changes

There are also numerous changes for developers. The largest single change is support for custom fields in locations. There are also tons of new hooks and filters. (And once I’ve finished documenting them, they’ll be even more useful.)

I didn’t manage to get the developer documentation done in time for release; but I’ll get that done as soon as I can!

What’s next for My Calendar?

Following this release, I’m going to be starting on a complete update to the templating system My Calendar uses, to modernize implementation of custom templates. No date right now for My Calendar 3.4.0; but you can reasonably assume it’ll be at least 6 months, and probably more. Before getting to My Calendar 3.4.0, I’ll be getting to work on the next major release of My Calendar Pro! My Calendar Pro also has a significant release today, with a number of smaller improvements and compatibility with My Calendar, but the major changes are still to come.

(Final numbers: I made 901 commits to My Calendar between the last release of My Calendar version 3.2 and the first release of 3.3.)