The beta release of My Calendar 3.7.0 is ready for testing. This major release includes numerous bug fixes, and a few major changes that would benefit from testing.
Breaking Change: Navigation HTML (HyperText Markup Language) changed
The My Calendar navigation has historically been a mix of links and forms. This made a lot of sense in the early days of the plugin, when navigation was driven by new page loads – the links were navigation, and moved you to a new page. However, for several years now the primary navigation has been driven by AJAX. With this model, it makes more sense for accessibility to use buttons.
This also has some potential impact on performance. In recent months, AI bots have been making very high demands on documents: My Calendar has had fundamentally infinite navigation, and this can cause bots to loop through far too many documents that are not actually content bearing.
Using buttons should cause some bots to elect not to navigate these functions.
However, this will absolutely have side effects for anybody using custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Selectors like .my-calendar-navigation a { } will simply not work; they need to be replaced with button selectors. This is a breaking change.
Major Change: Navigation Limiting
Also to help solve performance problems generated by bots, My Calendar 3.7.0 includes a key change to handling of date queries via URL (Uniform Resource Locator). If a URL is queried that asks for dates more than one year before the first event or more than one year after the last event, that query will return a 404 error.
This should have very little impact on users; the way My Calendar currently works, it shouldn’t be possible for a user to request a URL that is outside these parameters using the interface. However, I don’t know what I don’t know; if this causes problems, I may need to adjust.
Major Change: All front end JS rewritten
I’ve rewritten all the front-end JavaScript to remove the dependency on jQuery. Everything should fundamentally work the same way it did before, but I could have missed cases. Any testing to identify uncaught problems would be appreciated.
Major Change: Accessibility features are editable
One of the special accessibility features available in My Calendar has long been the ability to set the accessibility characteristics of any event or venue. An event may offer American Sign Language, or a venue may have Braille Signage. But these features have had limited scope, because they weren’t editable. Changing the features was messy and fragile.
In this release, these features are migrated to taxonomies, and can be edited and managed in the administration. This significant improves the ability to use these features effectively.
If you already use these features, your existing settings will be migrated; but this is something that should definitely be checked. The migration process is non-destructive, so if it does fail, you can return to the previous release without problems.
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