We've been working hard in the last couple of weeks to deliver the most feature rich DPCalendar version to our friends and community. The DPCalendar 4.0 release is a new milestone in the area of Digital Peak as we provide now an all in one event experience. The users can navigate through your events on the ajax based intuitive interface or based on locations. Let them attend the events and if needed let them pay for it through our new payment plugins "Manual payment" or "PayPal payment" (more payment plugins will come soon). Send out notifications to get them back to your site. Or do you need to import unlimited Google calendars. We have it now! Read on for a more detailed list of killer features in this release.
Payment Plugins
A long demandig feature request was to support some payment processors for attendancees to extend DPCalendar to a reservation system. You can now define in the attending options of DPCalendar a price the attendee has to pay for and a payment type with which she/he has to do the payment. On the attending form the visitor can to choose then from one of this options to make the payment.
It sounds like a simple addon but in the background we had to make big changes as it was needed to completely revamp the old workflow. We are proud now to deliver such a feature to you. In the future we will implement more payment gateways like 2checkout, authorize.net or more. We will see what er the biggest needs from our customers.
Unlimited external calendars
Since the beginning, DPCalendar was designed to support external calendar sources like Facebook pages, CalDAV servers, MS Exchange, Google calendar or more in a seamless way that the visitor will get insights into ALL your events on your Joomla site in one place. We had a limit of 10 calendars per external calendar plugin which was enough for most of our customers but not all. Because of that we implemented in the plugin options a completely new external calendar system which enables the site admin to add as many external calendars as needed.
For the most popular plugins like Google calendar, Facebook pages or CalDAV servers (iCloud, ownCloud, etc.) we made some importers for a hassle free quick setup.
More little features
We packed the verison 4 with tons of new nice little features. We have now an Xmap plugin to add your events easily to your sitemap. A new finder plugin integrates the DPCalendar events into smart search and events from Google can be edited directly in DPCalendar. The changes will be written back to Google immediately. To prevent spam events you can force certain user groups to add a captcha code when editing an event in the front.
What has changed?
Some legacy features like jQuery UI themes are removed in this version and we come now with single installer files for every kind of subscription. If you add the download ID we even support the Joomla core updates. Means you don't have to go extra to the DPCalendar control panel and do the update manually. You will get notified through the Joomla updated manager where the updates can be don through it.
The best comes last
Since I put my shoes into the IT world I'm an advocate of Open Source, that's the reason why I started to use Joomla. In my first years of Joomla extension development I gave away my extensions for free with the same passion or even more as I would get payed for it. So became GCalendar one of the most popular Joomla extension. The demand of the community increased and I decided to make a commercial version of GCalendar. DPCalendar was born! DPCalendar grow and became mature with a much more advanced feature set than it was ever possible with GCalendar. At the same time I wanted to give the Joomla community something back, that's the reason why we are offering a FREE version of DPCalendar which as basically the next step in the evolution of GCalendar. If you are a GCalendar user please read the migration guide how to do the transition from GCalendar to DPCalendar.
Sincerly
Allon Moritz (aka laoneo) founder of Digital Peak