Menu
  • Reading time: 5 minutes
DPCalendar 7.3

We are happy to announce that we released DPCalendar 7.3 to the public. This is a minor release with a new geolocation based tax feature and additional payment providers, read on for more details about them and what we added on top of these new features.

Location based taxes

Taxes are an important part when selling tickets online. In DPCalendar you can now create taxes which are applied per country and not globally for all events. The site admin can create unlimited tax rates in the back end and assign these tax rates to individual countries. If a site visitor books now an event, the country must be set and a tax is applied which is assigned to this country.

A tax rate can also be inclusive, this means that you create the end price of the ticket which already includes the tax. So basically the tax will be subtracted then from the end price to get the real ticket price. If the visitor opens the event details page and it's IP address belongs to a country where a tax is filled, then a message is shown on top to indicate that taxes will be applied for the country.

In the back end you can disable the locations you don't need so when a user opens the booking page, only the locations which are useful to your web site are displayed. So the location drop down doesn't start with Afghanistan if you are in a different part of the world. We event went a step further and it is also possible to define a default location for the booking form in the DPCalendar settings to have a better user experience. More information can be found in our docs.

DPCalendar taxes

New payment provider plugins and SCA

DPCalendar doesn't have a large set of payment provider plugins, but the ones we have are from well known companies we trust. As of popular request we added two new ones to our portfolio which we introduce below. Beside these payment provider changes, we made the provider list a bit more modern on purchase and do use now SVG's as inline icons instead of images.

Mollie payment provider

Mollie is very popular in the Nederlands and widely used on web sites. As we have good relations ships with many people from the Dutch Joomla community we wanted to give them the opportunity to be able to sell their tickets with their first choice provider. It was very easy to integrate them into DPCalendar and their platform is very convenient to manage.

Braintree payment provider

Braintree is a leading provider for worldwide transactions. So it is a good fit for DPCalendar and our global user base. Braintree support different payment methods and integrates seamless into your web page. The visitor never leaves your web site for payments and at the same time your are fully PCI compliant as the credit card data never touches your web server. Even strong customer authentication (SCA) is supported with 3D secure which we fully integrated to meet the EU regulations for online payments.

Stripe and SCA

Stripe integration is included from day one in DPCalendar. In this release we implemented strong user authentication (SCA) with 3D secure support during credit card payments within DPCalendar. This extra verification step is an EU regulation to make online payments more secure.

DPCalendar taxes

Schedule widget and more

The schedule of an event can be configured now in a similar way as on Facebook events. You can define unlimited entries which will be displayed in a slim timeline on the event details page. Additionally it is now possible to define per event settings which were before only available in menu items. This follows the Joomla best practice which is available for articles as well.

DPCalendar has also a powerful location management, which is fully geo based and support multiple locations and rooms per event. A future request was to make this location management a bit easier while editing an event, so we replaced the full location form within the event form through a simple location lookup field as you are familiar from system like Google calendar.

Event schedule

More small goodies

We are eager to improve DPCalendar on a regular basis to become the most intuitive calendar and event management extension for Joomla. Beside the big features we added some smaller ones you will like as well:

  • The upcoming module can now also display a map from the listed events.
  • Events can be exported now on the back end into a CSV file, similar to what we have already for bookings and tickets. No need to use phpMyAdmin anymore.
  • Maps do automatically zoom out when events are rendered outside of the default zoom level.
  • Unpublished events are now displayed in the profile view to let authors edit their own unpublished events before they get accepted from an admin.
  • The event link is added to the iCal export file.
  • Events are now fetched as soon they become available to the calendar.
  • Bookings can now being edited only as long as they were not active. The invoice data is now saved in the database, so it is not possible to generate an invoice with different data as soon as it get paid.
  • Locations have now also a metadata field for better SEO.
  • Datepicker is now triggered by a button as it was problematic on small screens when the keyboard did overflow it.
  • There is no line break anymore for the ellipsis when the text got truncated in the upcoming module and list view.

Changes under the hood

Our development setup was still from the times where composer and npm didn't exist and people started to migrate from SVN to Git. Hey, it was running fine and the need was very little to change that. But we completely rebuilt our inhouse architecture with docker and at this point took the chance to redo our development workflow as well. The repositories of our extensions do now contain no 3rd party dependencies anymore and the JS code is written in ES6 and transpiled back to older browsers. Our system tests setup is now completely docker based where Selenium, the web server, MySQL and the tests are running in their own containers. There is no need anymore to locally install Java, Selenium or PHP with JRobo. This kept us very busy in the last months but now we have a setup where we create releases, take screenshots, run tests, update documentation all with one command. We are forcing now the rule that no bug fix is merged without a test and no new feature got added without documentation. All in all we are prepared now for the next years with a modern and fast development process. We have also plans to open source this setup so other extension developer can benefit from our work.

Event schedule

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

We use cookies on our website. Some of them are essential for the operation of the site, while others help us to improve this site and the user experience (tracking cookies). You can decide for yourself whether you want to allow cookies or not. Please note that if you reject them, you may not be able to use all the functionalities of the site.