I’ve just pushed out updates with both my Last FM and Calendar plugins for WordPress.

Calendar is still going strong after all these years and has recently received a security audit and associated fixes as well as some useful fixes and tweaks as reported by users in the forums. As such this is well worth grabbing.

Last FM is less of an update, more of a health check. This continues to work well with the latest version of WordPress and so with no reported issues in the user forums and other commentary areas, this just receives a update to its tested up to tag compliant with WordPress 5.1

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted a blog update on the WordPress Calendar plugin, but as I’ve just pushed out another bug fix version I thought it a good idea to outline what has changed since I last posted and what is to come.

Firstly in skipping the last 2 versions worth of blog posts I’ve missed trumpeting a really useful new feature. I was contacted by an individual at the BBC last year who wanted to use my calendar (amongst others) to syndicate music event listings across a number of websites for a local radio station. What emerged was an iCalendar feed which both provided long desired functionality to the masses as well as allowing BBC local radio to syndicate events to their own music pages from dozens of local music related websites. Beers all round I think. The 1.3.10 release contains some well deserved fixes to this new functionality along with the usual checks to ensure the latest version of WordPress causes no issues.

In the pipeline then are performance boosts and a semi-rewrite which will seek to harmonise the visuals of a much loved and actively used front-end with developments and improvements in the big wide world of online calendaring. I’d like to provide a date, but as ever, these things take time and thought, neither of which are easy to estimate when holding down a day job and a hectic social schedule.

As ever it’s well worth hitting the update button to get hold of 1.3.10. Any problems or questions in the forums as usual please.

I suppose it should be called the “Ho, ho, ho!” release given the proximity to Christmas, but no, just another little bug fix release for loyal Calendar users. Tested with the latest version of WordPress and with a couple of annoying niggles fixed, it’s well worth hitting the update button. As usual, any problems in the forums please.

While 1.3.5 didn’t really merit a posting on account of it being a very small patch type release, 1.3.6 has a bit more meat on the bones.

Translations have made a bold debut into the WordPress plugin repository with a nice GUI for any code-shy translators to assist with their language skills. As such I’m now bundling all translations for Calendar that I have access to with every release. This makes internationalisation easier for users and ensures the plugin is fully compliant with all the repository features.

Other bug fixes were bundled into the release, most notably some performance improvements regarding the checking of the calendar database tables to ensure they were up to date with the code.

In a the next release we’ll be looking at a substantial tidy-up of the code, an attempt to move closer to some of the newer (and nicer) features of the latest WordPress version and some serious performance improvements regards the loading of events from the database.

After over two years of no updates to my calendar plugin for WordPress I’ve pushed out a change tonight. Even two years ago fixes had, for some time, been purely tweaks based on bug reports. While this latest change is not to be described as a significant update, it does more to the code than just playing around at the sidelines.

As with most code that is released to the community and then largely forgotten about save for the odd tweak, times change and what is accepted practice moves on. This is exactly what has happened with Calendar and it was high time to look at how it performed with the latest version of WordPress, review the latest best practice of the plugin repository and push out fixes to a few bugs that had been rumbling along in the support forums without fixes for too long.

I hope this release will be welcome for long term users of the plugin and for those who’ve never used it, a release after so long will push it back into the visible sections of the plugin repository so why not check it out?

Always keen to post when I find someone who’s using my Calendar plugin for something big or exciting, this week I received an e-mail from Adam Scott informing me that Calendar had received a mention in his book, WordPress for Education. If you work in academia or have an interest in expanding the focus of your WordPress work, this book may just be worth a look.

I recently received an invite to add my Calendar project to fundry and given that the site is clearly an innovative idea and is run by folks who have worked on some great projects elsewhere, I decided to give it a go.

Essentially, it’s a site that allows you to request a new feature in a particular project and pledge a certain amount to fund it. Once the developer of a project deems the pledged amount is worth them developing the feature, they can do so, then mark the item as delivered. Once enough users who pledged have accepted the feature then the funds are released to the developer.

I thought this would be a good idea for Calendar as while it will always be free and I will always keep developing new features as I see fit, it would be nice to allow the community to twist development in their favour through donations. This is not of course belittling the many who make donations independently of new features delivered to them!

Anyhow, if you want a new feature for Calendar and don’t see it in the pipeline based on forum discussions, why not pledge an amount on fundry to have it developed.

I’ve previously resisted the temptation to publicise high profile users of my calendar plugin but now that a website that has helped myself and many of my friends raise money for charity throughout their student years and beyond has adopted it, I feel compelled to start publishing the select few.

Many thanks then to Just Giving who are using my events calendar on their blog, it’s an honour and a privilege.

I’ve quickly pushed out a new development release of Calendar to address some style issues. I’ve not added this as a proper release as there are some more issues I want to fix before I take that step. None the less, success has been reported with this version in the forums. You can download it here.

To get the benefit of the fixed styles, tick the reset styles box on the calendar options page after installing. If you’ve made style changes you’ll want to save the contents of the CSS box before doing this!

Calendar version 1.2.3 has been released. You can download it from WordPress or from my own site. Thanks to all who helped with testing and especially to those who offered solutions to discovered issues.

This release sees a whole raft of important bug fixes, if you have a minor issue with your current install it will almost certainly be fixed in this version.

In addition to fixes, a number of enhancements have been added

• Full support for WordPress 3.0
• Recurring events by weekday (ie. 3rd Sunday of every month)
• Ability to list today’s and upcoming events on posts/pages using tags

Hope you continue to enjoy using Calendar!