We are happy to announce that we released DPCalendar 7.2 with some new goodies to the public. According to our development roadmap we want to ship new Minor versions in November and May but due some private circumstances we had to postpone this one for June. So we had enough time for testing and polishing that you will get a shiny new version of one of the best Joomla event management extension.
In this release we were focusing mainly on recurring events improvement and to make the map experience better on touch devices. Read on for more details about the changes in version 7.2.
Book whole series
Till now it was possible to book single events or instances of a recurring series. The visitor had to individually select per instance of the series the required tickets. In this release we added a new flag for the event, where the author can define that the visitor can only book the whole series. This is handy when you have for example a workshop which spans over multiple session, but every session of this workshop depends on the previous one and it doesn't make sense to book individual sessions.
The price value of the original event is then treated as price for the whole series and the individual events of the series will have no booking configuration.
Display series information
Series information have been limited in the past. We added two more options which will make your life as site admin easier. One will allow you to show the original events beside the none recurring events in the modules or menu items only. This means the lists will not being cluttered with the same events, only one instance of the same event series will be displayed. The other one is an ongoing flag you already know from the upcoming module. This one includes now also series.
The recurring rrule property is transformed to a human readable string and displayed along the event date. Means your visitor can quickly detect how long the series will last. Beside that we have added also a new panel in the event details view which will show the next events of the series.
Map changes
Maps are heavy elements on a web site, so they should only be loaded when the become visible in the viewport. Modern browsers do allow to hook into their system and get notified when an element becomes visible, if this event got fired, then we are loading the map now from Google or OpenStreetMap, not before.
Our maps are rendered with the rock solid leaflet library, which allows us to add goodies like the full screen icon or an improved gesture handling which allows your visitor to scroll the page even though she/he is on the map or on a touch device. A very nice addition which we at Digital Peak like very much is the new clustering behavior. When multiple events di happen on the same location or in a very close radius, then a clustor icon is displayed with the amount of events. Is the visitor zooming in or clicking on the icon, then the events will expand.
Structure improvements
An ongoing effort is to improve our extensions HTML markup with every release. We are using the BEM methodology and are constantly fine tuning the blocks with more logical classes. In this version we worked heavily on the structure of our entities (events and locations) details pages. We added more containers, which will allow you to position them even better in a CSS grid. Our back end views are now also using the same setup as the front end ones with BEM classes and unified structure, while being framework agnostic as much as possible.
Beside that we have reviewed the headings structure and did some small changes to have a proper hierarchy which should improve the understanding of our pages. The colors of some elements got also small changes to have proper color contrasts that we pass the WCAG AA tests.
It is pretty much a standard nowadays to have the form buttons on the bottom of the page, so we did that in the event form page on the front end too. The calendar JS script got upgraded to version 4 which is now dependency free and the buttons do look now like the rest in DPCalendar.
Small improvements and bug fixes
Beside the great new features, we fixed some bugs and added many little goodies like direction links or location colors to DPCalendar to make your life as administrator easier and to offer your visitors a neat event experience. The following list represents the full changelog of the new 7.2 version:
- [#6542] Only book whole series allowed
- [#6686] OpenStreetMap - full screen icon
- [#6692] Location color setting
- [#6721] Map marker clustering
- [#6836] Add option to show the original event instead of the instances in the views and modules
- [#6915] Directions links for locations
- [#6278] Extend back end views with BEM style classes
- [#6454] Default location when creating an event
- [#6569] Notify when a location is created
- [#6588] Display event title as h2
- [#6595] Move tags to information block
- [#6710] Move form action buttons to the bottom
- [#6725] Show ticket form in order form only when multiple tickets
- [#7015] Sampledata should have central european data format support
- [#6775] Calendar and location view toolbar similar rendering as the list view
- [#6800] Copy booking field value to ticket field
- [#6841] Core page header class
- [#6852] Improve OSM map scroll and touch behavior
- [#6897] Remove opacity in upcoming dates for better accessibility
- [#6902] Show recurring rule as views and modules
- [#6907] Cleanup space of blocks in event details view
- [#6910] Add option to show the price in the upcoming module
- [#6917] Show capacity used in list views
- [#6919] Load map when it becomes visible
- [#6928] Move terms input to own container with a label
- [#6940] Text below label on payment options
- [#6943] Do not show payment options when booking form is invalid
- [#6946] Wrap location details in it's own container
- [#6954] Update major versions in different JS scripts
- [#7003] Ongoing flag for list views
- [#7011] Render tags field with Joomla Core script
- [#7012] More filters in event modal
- [#6745] Outlook CalDAV Synchronizer is not displaying events on none public calendars
- [#6851] Display page header in event details view
- [#6868] Meta description is not shown on the event details view
- [#6870] Do not load autocomplete in map module when search is disabled
- [#6951] Upcoming module shows booking page with actual url
- [#6958] DB cache delivers deleted instances of recurring events
- [#6982] Backend calendar item form -> month names not translated
- [#6992] Events from SQL Plugin are not shown in Search results
- [#6999] Default image size settings in blog view is not responsive
- [#7001] Saving private event throws an error
We recommend always to make a backup first and do the upgrade on a test clone of your production site to have no unexpected downtime. Also clearing the Joomla cache is a good advice when upgrading extensions in general, not just when upgrading the Joomla CMS.
Kind regards
Allon Moritz aka laoneo
Founder of Digital Peak