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dpcalendar 5Digital Peak is pleased to announce after some time in beta, the latest major release of DPCalendar, one of Joomla!’s most highly-rated calendaring extension, is ready for download from our download portal. We spent a fair amount of time to build the biggest release in the history of DPCalendar. We would like to say thank you to all the people who were testing the beta releases and provided valuable feedback during that time. We at Digital Peak are really impressed to be working together with such an amazing community. Here, we explain some of the most salient features in DPCalendar 5.

Support of Joomla 2.5 has been dropped

As per our EOL support policy, DPCalendar 4.x is the last branch that will be supported on Joomla 2.5; the new DPCalendar 5.x will only be supported on (at minimum) Joomla 3.3 – we do not recommend you install it on earlier versions of Joomla. Dropping support for Joomla 2.5 allows us to implement features from the Joomla 3 series which we can't add if we were to continue supporting Joomla 2.5. As noted in the EOL policy, we will still ship minor releases if critical bugs will appear or security issues are discovered.

dpcalendar 5 j25

New configuration UI

There are several new configuration options that can be modified in a more user-friendly fashion, instead of having to manually do layout overrides. We went back to plain PHP code for some of the most important views and modules. This means we will be able to do more advanced stuff in the future, as it would be possible with the mustache based approach. Additionally, we moved some of the code pieces to layouts which would allow the site admin to override only specific parts of the DPCalendar output (instead of using full template overrides). Check out the layouts folder on administrator/components/com_dpcalendar/layouts after you have installed DPCalendar 5.0.

dpcalendar 5 options

Improved schema support

Rich data (or microdata) support is becoming increasingly important in making your sites more accessible – and comprehensible – to the various search engines out there. Rich data are additional information attached to your site’s listing on the various search engines’ result pages. This means it will draw attention to your listings in the search engine results page. The new version of DPCalendar better supports the microdata formats as laid out by schema.org. For example, we support pricing of events now. For more information please visit schema.org.

dpcalendar 5 schema

Timezone switcher

You can activate a time zone switcher in the DPCalendar configuration that the visitor can use to switch to his preferred time zone when browsing events. As various governments modify time zones (and DST dates), the time zone switcher will be updated accordingly.

dpcalendar 5 timezone

Event history tracking

Since Joomla 3.2, it has been possible to track the history of edits of an article. We’ve adapted this feature to DPCalendar events. Initially, this feature is disabled. In the DPCalendar options, you can turn it on and configure how many revisions should be saved per event.

dpcalendar 5 history tracking

Support of Joomla tags for events

In Joomla 3.1, tags have been introduced. This means extensions can support tags through the UCM layer of the Joomla core. DPCalendar has connected its events to that layer and offers a field in the event edit form to attach tags to the event.

dpcalendar 5 tags

Multiple event images

DPCalendar 5.0.0 now allows you to attach up to three images per event. This adds what has been a longstanding feature request for DPCalendar. For every image, caption text and alt text can be defined to improve SEO for the event images. A demo can be seen on our demo page.

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dpcalendar 5 images

Some more interesting features

    1. Blog layout support
      DPCalendar 5.0.0 comes with a blog layout for upcoming module as well as a new blog menu item, similar to Joomla articles. The new layouts will show more information than the existing ones.
    2. Better Facebook support
      When integrated with Facebook, DPCalendar can now display Facebook event covers as the event image(s).
    3. Default centres for maps
      As the title says, default centres can be specified for all maps within DPCalendar. In an earlier version of DPCalendar, the users location was taken, but since Maxmind closed its public API, we have to go that way.
    4. Content plugin
      As with every big Joomla extension, we come with a content plugin. You can now include code like {{#events calid=42 limit=3}}<p>{{title}</p>{{/events}} into your articles and the upcoming events will be displayed.
    5. Improved CalDAV access
      If you need to export native DPCalendar calendars to your CalDAV clients, you should notice better CalDAV support from DPCalendar.

As always, there are many other enhancements and bug fixes. DPCalendar 5.0.0 is available in both free and paid versions on the JED. As this is a new major version which will break backward compatibility and makes your template overrides obsolete, we expect small bugs here and there. We will have our ears close to the support platform to react fast to any issues and ship the fixes on a fast pace (which is what we do anyways).

If you want to purchase a subscription, you can use the following coupon code and you will get 25% discount. It is valid till 30. April 2015, so hurry up.

DPCALENDAR5

We hope you enjoy the new version as much as we do, because you can expect from us big things in 2015 as we have plans to develop extensions which will turn your Joomla site into a full featured Dropbox-like site. More information will come in Q3 of 2015.

Best Regards

Allon Moritz aka laoneo
Founder of Digital Peak

 

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