Got an e-mail from someone who has started a mountain biking site for Swindon who is using my Calendar plugin. Could this be the push that finally makes me “get on my bike”? If I collect my bike from St. Albans this weekend it would give me little excuse to not have a go on some of the local trails!

The first translations have begun to trickle through for Calendar; German, Spanish and Galician. You can download these translations in the translations thread on the calendar forums.

Many thanks to those who have taken the time to translate and who have shared their work with others by submitting it to me for publication. If you have translated Calendar into your native language, please submit your PO file to me for compilation and distribution.

It has recently come to my attention that users of Calendar were having trouble registering on my support forums so they could ask questions – activation e-mails were not arriving.

I have now fixed the issue with the server that was causing these e-mails to fail and have ensured that all outstanding messages have been sent, so anyone who registered so they could ask a question and hadn’t yet had got their account activated should now be able to do so.

Calendar version 1.2.2 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.

Keen eyes will notice that 1.2.2 supports WordPress 2.8 but the latest stable version of WordPress is 2.7.1. All this means is that I have tested compatibility with the latest 2.8 beta in readiness for it’s stable release date.

As promised in my post just a day or two ago, Calendar for WordPress 1.2.2 has now been released in beta. You can download it here.

In addition to the promised new features and bug fixes detailed in the last post, the following have also been squeezed in.

• Corrected a couple of spelling mistakes in the default English language text
• Fixed a Calendar admin panel issue where URLs would grow in length if certain options were chosen consecutively
• Ensured that, should an error be thrown due to problematic user entry, the entered data would remain on screen for easy correction

As always, please be aware that this is beta software. It might have bugs or errors and using it on a live site would be unwise. If you are tech-savvy and wish to test this release then I would be most grateful for your feedback and bug reports in the comments on this post. If not then the non-beta full release will be made available when WordPress 2.8 comes out of beta which looks to be any day now.

As an aside, it seems fitting that a new version of Calendar is being released now as the total number of Calendar downloads has recently exceeded 30,000!

I’m currently working on an interim release of calendar, version 1.2.2. This should be ready by the start of next week. I say interim because this is simply a precursor to a brand new release, 1.3, which will be packed with new and requested features. This bumper new version should grace the internet with it’s presence in August.

As usual I will be looking for beta testers for the new release so for everyone who is interested in testing this, please keep an eye on my blog for the release announcement next week.

Features and bug fixes being added in the 1.2.2 version include:

• Full gettext language support
• Fixed bug with subscribers permissions variable
• Improved README and FAQ
• Changed link back to point here instead of old business site
• Fixed bug with function call to capture blog URL
• Neatened some rough edges in the back-end styles
• Fully tested WPMU support
• Support for WordPress 2.8
• Improved error catching
• Fix implemented for ambiguous error messages
• Improved widget behaviour by abstracting legacy calls from widget calls

I hope you will enjoy the new release and would, at this stage, like to thank all those who have reported bugs. I do listen, even if I don’t reply and I hope this list of fixes shows that this is the case. As above, testers be sure to keep a look out for the beta version!

I’ve pushed out a quick update to Calendar for WordPress. I’d had a few bugs reported with styles that I wanted to fix for perfections sake, but also some more serious issues concerning compatibility with the legacy 2.0.x branch of WordPress. Keen to keep my word on backwards compatibility I fixed the issues, ran some tests and pushed out a new minor version release this morning.

No security issues are fixed in this upgrade so there is no rush to update if you don’t want to but if you are running the WordPress 2.0.x branch I recommend updating as soon as possible so you will be running bug free.

You can grab your copy straight from WordPress.

For those who want to pick up the slightly fixed styles you will need to use the “Reset Styles” tick box on the calendar options screen after upgrading – be aware that you will lose any modifications you have made to calendar styles if you do this.

After the latest testing of the release candidate I was pleased to find few if any bug reports and so I have decided to push the release live. I updated the WordPress Plugins SVN repository yesterday and the 1.2 final version is now available for download on WordPress.org and on my site.

I was pleased to note that the download record was broken yesterday on the WordPress plugins site so it looks promising in terms of uptake. If you are running the old version I whole-heartedly encourage you to upgrade. There are a lot of improvements and new features all of which I’m sure you will enjoy using.

Please also note that support is now only available in the open source area of my business forums. This means that blog comments, e-mails and IMs related to calendar support will be ignored. Using the forums allows people to search for a solution first and for me to place regularly asked questions in the FAQ.

After a slightly longer than expected break since the first beta release of Calendar 1.2 I’ve decided to go straight ahead and release the first (and hopefully only) release candidate of Calendar 1.2.

Since the beta phase I’ve made improvements that not only fix all the bugs that were logged in comments but I’ve fixed a few others that I found along the way, tweaked some of the things that I didn’t feel were quite right and squeezed in some new features – some of which were originally going to have to wait until version 1.3!

The added features since the last release are as follows

• Mini pop-up calendars in the admin panel to assist with choosing correct dates
• Full categories system to allow events to be grouped by type (off by default)
• Categories key is displayed below the calendar when categories are enabled
• Events can now be links as well as mouse-overs
• Items listed in todays events/upcoming events now sport links and mouse-overs.
• Small tweaks to the style and display logic to improve the standard look
• Issue of times not displaying according to WordPress settings fixed
• Issue of extra padding/blank titles on the widgets fixed
• Issue of mouse-overs not working in IE6 fixed

You may well notice other improvements which have escaped my memory.

Users of Calendar 1.2 beta will be pleased to discover that I decided to provide an upgrade path after all and so you should find that all you need to do is replace your current calendar directory with the new one and you should be away. The same of course applies to users of the current main release (1.1.2) but you should follow the upgrade instructions in the readme.txt file carefully in this case.

Please provide all feedback and any bug reports in the comments of this post. Please do not post feature requests. The release available in this post will be the final release if no bugs are found. If bugs are found they will be fixed and then the final version will be released. No new features will be added until the next major version.

Oh yes and how could I forget, you can download Calendar 1.2 Release Candidate 1 here.

So, here it is, Calendar 1.2 Beta 1 finally seeing the light of day! I’d like to thank everyone for their patience in waiting for this, I hope after giving it a try you will feel the wait has been worthwhile. The final release will come two weeks from today, after people have had a chance to test the software and report bugs in the comments field of this post.

So, before I get to the actual release link, some house rules. There will be no support for this release. If you choose to use it live, that is your shout, but if you break something or someone hacks you, its your fault and you will have to deal with it. What I am after here is bug reports and comprehensive testing. Comments about how well the tests are going, problems, bugs, security flaws are welcome. Such comments should be made in the comments field of this post only, nowhere else. I’m not taking comments and questions by e-mail because there will most likely be too many. Thanks for understanding!

Ok, so the Calendar 1.2 Beta 1 release is here. Instructions are in the readme.txt file, please read this first, especially if you are upgrading. If you are upgrading you should ensure you backup your blog and your current install of Calendar, including the database. You may very well need this if there are unforeseeable problems, or if there is an issue with the beta such that the upgrade feature fails and causes problems. Again, you test this at your own risk and while I can’t see any problems with it at my end, that doesn’t mean you won’t. If you find a problem, report it, I’ll fix it.

A final note is that those of you with keen eyes will note the Event Categories feature is missing. I don’t have much spare time as you all know so I’ve decided to leave this out of the beta because I don’t want to release something which I know to have issues due to the lack of time spent on it. During the beta phase I will work on this feature and it will make it into the final release. If testing is required of this added functionality then a beta 2 will be released instead of the final version in two weeks meaning the absolute final release will be 4 weeks from now. I hope however that because the categories feature will use much of what is being tested in the beta already, an additional beta will not be necessary.