Major updates to both My Calendar and My Calendar Pro went out today. The most significant user-facing change is the switch from using a elements for navigation to using button elements for navigation.

This only applies if you have AJAX navigation enabled; if you’re using page refreshes to navigate My Calendar, the navigation will render as links.

This is intended to fix two issues: an accessibility concern where the element used to navigate didn’t match the way navigation works when using AJAX navigation, and a performance issue caused by excessive crawling by bots.

The bot issue is also addressed by limiting the range of pages that can be displayed. My Calendar has a theoretically unlimited set of possible calendar dates to display, and this meant that aggressive bots (that ignored crawling directives) would potentially crawl your site infinitely. My Calendar now restricts browsing to a maximum of one year before your first event and one year after your last event, which significantly reduces the scope.

Additional bot control features include the ability to fully disable the day, month, or week views. Previously, while the navigation may not have been enabled, the views still existed. The day view, in particular, can result in a very large number of possible pages. You can now disable these views entirely, and they will not be rendered.

See the beta release announcement for more details about the changes and features in My Calendar 3.7.0.

My Calendar Pro updates

The updates in My Calendar Pro are less major, but necessary to maintain feature compatibility with My Calendar. One of the major changes is adding support for personal events, a new feature in My Calendar. Personal events are events you can add to My Calendar that are only visible to you, and not to other users.

The importer and iCal parser have had significant updates that should improve performance and expands the support for event features imported from remote calendars.