I’ve been hard at work getting ready for my annual major release. This year’s update to My Calendar won’t have a lot of spectacular features or major interface changes – but it’s pretty heavy on prep work for future changes in My Calendar Pro and for My Calendar 3.5.
Changes in My Calendar 3.4.0
One of the key changes is a refining the way that options and defaults are managed – instead of having dozens of individual entries, just about everything is going to be managed as a single setting. One of the big perks to this change is that I’m adding a feature to import and export My Calendar’s settings. Having all of the settings in a single option simplifies that process considerably!
There are extensive changes to the My Calendar scripting, including the introduction of a modal option. Until now, the popup events in My Calendar have been a kind of hybrid disclosure widget/modal, and this makes a more decisive difference. The modal is 100% a modal; the disclosure widget is more like a disclosure widget.
I’ve added a couple of long-requested features, including exposing event titles in list view and supporting the display of multiple months at once in the calendar view.
Prep for My Calendar 3.5
An additional key change is prep work for a total revamp of the templating system. The new templating system is partially in place already, and you can enable it if you want using the filter mc_legacy_templates_enabled. I’m not recommending that you do – it’s still only partially ready, and I haven’t written any of the documentation for it yet.
As part of the revamping of templating, I’m also going to be eliminating the ability to edit My Calendar core stylesheets. This has been a major thorn in my side for years – it makes it vastly more difficult to fix stylesheet issues or manage the look and feel of the core plugin with any degree of reliability – and it’s mostly totally unnecessary. All of the recommended locations for custom stylesheets are editable via the theme or plugin editor, so if you want to edit styles, you’ll still be able to do it, and keeping your custom work out of the plugin is incredibly important for giving a better default experience.
I’ll be shifting to a richer variety of editing tools for editing style variables, so that there are more options available for styling without needing to edit CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) directly.
Prep for My Calendar Pro
The next major release of My Calendar Pro will ship with a custom field builder, so that it’s much easier to add custom fields to your event forms. But a number of the changes to make this possible require changes in My Calendar to be in place, first, so I’m hoping to get the major release of My Calendar Pro out around a month after My Calendar releases. My Calendar Pro will also have support for Stripe, more consistent styles and classes for front-end inputs, a re-vamped shortcode builder, and a large number of other miscellaneous features and improvements.
The next major release of My Calendar Pro is currently targeted for January 15th, 2023.
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