Both My Calendar and My Tickets are nearing their next major releases. I just tagged My Calendar 3.5’s first release candidate, and I’m hoping that this means I’m really pretty close to wrapping up this huge phase of development.

My Calendar 3.5

My Calendar 3.5 is a big set of changes, and it does include some breaking changes in the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) output. Here are a few of the major changes:

  1. PHP (Hypertext PreProcessing) Templating. For many years, My Calendar has gotten by with a custom-written template parser that takes a set of template tags and builds them into a view. It didn’t support conditionals except on a very basic level, and was fairly difficult to work with. In My Calendar 3.5, I’m adding support for PHP templating. You can drop replacement templates into your theme to make more complex customizations to templates. This won’t be enabled by default, but can be toggled on in the Display settings. (See the draft documentation)
  2. Import from The Events Calendar A frequently requested feature; it will now be possible to import your events from an active version of The Events Calendar.
  3. Responsive Mode My Calendar has supported responsive mode in Pro for years, but it’s become a major limitation to users of the free version, so it’s moving over.
  4. Card views The card view is a popular design concept that My Calendar has never supported. It’ll be benefited from using a consistent style of featured image on events, but doesn’t require them.
  5. New CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) variables With the removal of style editing in 3.5 (announced in 3.4), I’ve added a set of CSS variables that you can customize and preview in the admin.

In addition to these major features, there are countless minor improvements and experience polishing changes, focused on the front-end experience.

If you are a casual user of My Calendar, you’ll probably benefit from these changes. If, however, you have heavily customized the styles for My Calendar, then you should test in a staging environment before updating. There are a lot of changes in the HTML output and default styles. The new core styles handle these, but it is almost a guarantee that they will not work perfectly with your customizations.

My Tickets 2.0

While not on the scale of the changes to My Calendar, this major release to My Tickets is not insignificant. This release is mostly focused on making some architectural changes, though there are a number of helpful features, as well.

  1. Improve General Admission tickets General admission tickets in My Tickets are tickets that are good for a range of dates. In My Tickets 2.0, in addition to fixed length usage, you can make them valid indefinitely or set a fixed date for them to expire.
  2. Virtual Inventory management My Tickets has always removed tickets from available inventory when a purchase is completed. This can be a problem for high demand sales, however. With My Tickets 2.0, you can optionally turn on inventory tracking that also accounts for tickets that are in an active cart.
  3. Bulk QR Code check-in When tickets are bought as a group, you can view the tickets in that purchase all at once. Now, you can also scan a single QR code to check in the entire group.
  4. Multi-date ticket sales In the past, if an event had multiple dates, you had to create a whole new post for each date. If you don’t need to manage different types of purchasers or sections, you can add multiple dates for a single event post.

In addition, a wide variety of less significant adjustments to features across the plugin.

Testing

I’m asking for users of either plugin to take some time to test the pre-release versions. These are large changes, and I’ve been working hard on them – but I know that I won’t have caught everything.

I’m running both plugins currently on live sites that are willing participants in beta testing, and my demos site is running the most current code for both plugins. So I feel confident that they aren’t likely to fail catastrophically. But broader usage shows up issues that are more obscure, and it’s those obscure issues I’d like to catch sooner rather than later.

Make any comments on either plugin in their respective Github repositories:

Release Timing

I’m aiming for release in early to mid April. I’m not willing to commit to a specific date, but that’s what I want to do.