Joomla news about Digital Peak

Till now attendees could only book existing events in DPCalendar. A big demand is, to have a kind of reservation system, where visitors can book free slots. As people have many different use cases, we are following the strategy to support stable form builders where we can integrate DPCalendars easily into them. RSForm!Pro is such one, as it allows you to create any reservation form you want, including payment support and confirmation mail delivery.

The new DPCalendar RSForm!Pro plugin offers a new form field which site integrators can add to their forms. It does show a calendar and different options per day where a reservation can be done, when there is no event at that time slot. Like that it is easy possible to setup a car reservation site or yoga private class feature on your Joomla site. Payments, multiple options and enhanced mail integrations are supported as well. More information can be found in the docs article of the plugin.

DPAttachments is the standard attachments component for Joomla 4. It perfectly integrates into DPCalendar, like that it is possible to upload attachments for events, locations or even bookings. Since version 5.1.0 can authors of events configure attachments in a way, that they are only visible when the visitor has a ticket. Additionally a host has now the same rights as the author of the event and can upload attachments even when there are is no edit permissions available on the event itself. Even attachments of the original event are now displayed in the attachments list of the individual instance.

More information can be found in the DPCalendar plugin docs article or the DPAttachments developer documentation when you plan to integrate it into your own component.

The booking system in DPCalendar did grow over the last years massively. Now it is time to consolidate it and make it a smooth experience for event attendees. That's why we added some important improvements to the booking wizard. On the top is a new panel displayed, which indicates on which step the attendee is in the booking process.

The banking information is not shown anymore only on the last page of the process, instead of, it is sent as invoice to the attendee per mail. This is a more standard behavior and the attendee can easily add the PDF to it's accounting software or upload it in the ebanking system. Now it is also possible to download a receipt for existing bookings and the former invoices are now available through the manual plugin and can easily be adapted by a layout override. Additionally a new QR code plugin shows Swiss QR code invoices for bookings.

A new cancel closing date offers the possibility to cancel or delete bookings only till a certain date. Like that can the admin can prevent situations where bookings are canceled after the event has started. As default is the start date of the event taken as date where the cancel/delete action is not anymore possible.

More information can be found in the booking system docs chapter or the payment plugin documentation.

Since joomla 4 there are many more possibilities for an extension to hook into the system or to extend existing extensions with plugins. That's why our installable packages did grow with every new release. For example in DPCalendar 8.6.0 are four new plugins added, in total there are now over 40 extensions for Premium subscribers.

This is nice for the end user but the packages to install are growing too. On some hosting sites the recent release caused issues when installable zip files were too large. That's why we make the core packages of our extensions as small as possible and offer the individual plugins as standalone download with their own update servers. The benefit is, that you have to install only the necessary extensions, which do make your system faster when you have less plugins installed. This means for you that in the future you have to install the core package of DPCalendar and only the plugins you need.

Please read carefully the upgrade chapter below what you have to do after the update.