3 months after DPCalendar 6.0 was shipped, which was the biggest version in the era of DPCalendar, we are proud to ship the next update with some amazing new features. Especially the booking system got tons of new options to adjust it to your needs. Additionally a long standing feature to disable the end date can now be defined on a per event level. Read on for detailed explanation of the main features.
Our booking system had already a good amount of functionality and we see an increasing list of web sites, from small to big, which are using it extensively. Appetite comes with eating, so there was demand for more advanced features. And here we go.
The order of the fields can be defined in the booking form, including the custom fields. The fields which are not defined in the order list will be appended automatically. Additionally you can define if the default fields should be required, optional or hidden in the booking form. The name and e-mail field can't be changed as they are required anyway.
The booking layout has similar options as the form. You can define which fields should be shown or not and in which order they should be displayed. Additionally we show the booking custom fields on more places like the confirmation mail or the bookings list.
The booking system allows now fine tuning of the confirmation mails. You can define the body of the mail with the standard Joomla Wysiwyg editor, as default, a language string is used for multilanguage support. And you can define which mail should be sent out with which attachments. Also the invitation to register can be disabled for guest bookings.
Over the years, one of the most requesting feature was to have the possibility to hide the end time of an event. As this is a very difficult task, because DPCalendar offers CalDAV access with a built in server and ical export, an end time is always required. But at the same time we take the feedback of our customers very seriously, so we were looking for a way to support both worlds. There is now a new option when editing an event to hide the end time. You still have to fill an end time, but on DPCalendar in your Joomla site it will be then hidden.
Beside the great new features, we fixed some bugs and added many little goodies 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 6.1 version:
We tested this version extensively, so you can be safe when upgrading. Just install the whole package from our download site or trough the Joomla update manager, DPCalendar will take care about the rest. As in respect to our backwards compatibility promise, there are no changes in this version which will break your existing layout overrides or require special attention from you.
BUT 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
Allon did attend another great J and Beyond conference, a place where the geeks do meet. He hold two sessions about the new media manager in Joomla 4 and how to migrate your extension to Joomla 4.
Slides can be found here.
Slides can be found here.
Shortly after Joomla 3.7 was released, we are happy to announce DPCalendar 6.0. Our new cutting edge version of one of the best Joomla calendar and event manager comes with some amazing new features. We use the kickass new custom fields library, which is by the way donated by us to the Joomla community. Beside that we were revamping the whole template layer of DPCalendar to work with any major CSS frameworks like Bootstrap 2/3/4 or UiKit, as well as Font Awesome for icons. More on that later.
Additionally we are preparing slowly for Joomla 4, but this will be covered in another blog post. First we want to introduce our new major features of DPCalendar 6. Enjoy reading.
Till now we have already out of the box support for Bootstrap 2 and 3, but we were still shipping a namespaced bootstrap 2 version which can be activated in DPCalendar when the template didn't fit into the bootstrap stack. We got rid of that and refactored the whole templating layer of DPCalendar to work natively with any major CSS frontend framework like Bootstrap 2/3/4 or UiKit. But that's not all, want to be ready for the future as well when old ones get deprecated and new ones arise or custom elements get implemented. Means our templating layer is made that way, adding a new CSS framework or icon set requires us minimal code changes and they will affect all views and layouts in DPCalendar. This step is needed as Joomla itself will not be backwards compatible across major versions when we do bootstrap major shifts. More on that problem can be read here.
Additionally we have been moving any part in DPCalendar which produces output to a layout. We went even so far that the forms for events, locations, bookings and tickets are rendered by the same layout on the front and back end.
There are two new views available. A locations view which shows all configured locations in DPCalendar and a location details view which shows the information about a location and the upcoming events. The event details pages does not link anymore to Google maps directly, instead of to the location details page. For every menu type additional parameters are available to define the initial latitude and longitude as well as the zoom factor.
Under the hood we refactored the code the way, that we can integrate more maps libraries like OpenStreetMap. But we open that door in a future release.
All Javascript and CSS files are now in the media folder and can be overriden in the template when desired.
As DPCalendar was already working fine with DPFields, it supports now out of the box the Joomla custom fields. That's why DPCalendar 6 is only compatible with Joomla 3.7. If you want to have a look how all of that works, then we suggest to check out our demo site. We prepared a series of events for you where you can see how it works. On the back end you can also play around with the custom fields to get a feeling for it. Basically it works the same way as with the core, eg. articles or contacts.
We support custom fields for events, locations, bookings and tickets.
Beside the great new features, we fixed some bugs and added many little goodies 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 6.0 version:
We tested this version extensively, but we expect some bugs in the next weeks as we have rewritten every single line in the template and layout files (there are over 1'000 files touched). So please make a backup before you do the upgrade! The template overrides will not work anymore, so please remove them from your templates HTML folder. After these steps are done, you can install your downloaded DPCalendar 6 package through the extension manager or update it through the extension update functionality.
The 5.x series changes now to maintenance mode. This means, when critical bugs appear or security issues do arise, then we will make patch releases for the 5.x series. No new features will be released, our full focus goes to version 6.
This release took us longer than expected, but it was worth the effort and time we put into this version. You as valuable user of DPCalendar will have a great new calendar and event experience for Joomla for many years!
Kind regards
Allon Moritz aka laoneo
Founder of Digital Peak
As you probably know, DPFields is the base for the new Joomla 3.7 custom fields feature. Most of you are eagerly waiting for the migration to Joomla custom fields. So we want to explain the process and clarify the future of DPFields in this blog post.
Since the merge of the custom fields feature in October 2016, we have been working heavily to stabilize it. During that time the community decided to skip some of the features we have already shipped with DPFields. For example the Gallery plugin is not available in core anymore or the templating functionality to render the fields inside the article description. One of the biggest changes was to move from categories to it's own entity for field groups, which do complicate the migration very much. More on that a bit later.
On the other side some new features have been added to custom fields. The biggest one is the move to fields plugins. Beside that some minor changes do have happened on the database schema and in the logic which will affect the migration path.
For a long time after the merge it looked like that the migration will just be a database table rename and all is good. But with the changes from categories to their own field groups, a lot of logic needs to be implemented on the DPFields side to make a painless migration. Not even to mention taking care of all the ACL settings. So it will take us a bit of time to make a proper migration script.
But don't worry, we will come up with a solution as we are using DPFields in production by ourselves and want to migrate to Joomla custom fields as well.
As we mentioned earlier, the core doesn't have the same feature set as DPFields has. So we will not shut down DPFields. We will make DPFields a product on top of Joomla custom fields with more features. This means, that we migrate the DPFields fields to com_fields fields under the hood. Additionally we have planed to offer dynamic content types and some new field plugins. All of that needs some time for development, so follow us on Twitter for latest updates. The core of DPFields will be forevere free of charge, that the users will have a painless migration to Joomla custom fields. Perhaps we will add then in the future some Pro features, but this is not decided yet.
After all the positive feedback about Joomla custom fields, the Digital Peak team is very happy that we brought it into the core. It costed us a lot of energy, resources and time, but at the end we are still convinced that it was worth it. We are sure that Joomla is now on a good track and that it will help a lot of web site administrators and site integrators to spice up their site. We felt a new vibe of motivation in the community and with the plugin based approach we are sure that to Joomla eco system will come up with amazing new custom fields plugins.
So enjoy the new Joomla custom fields!
Allon Moritz
Founder of Digital Peak
It was a turbulent and amazing 2016 for DIgital Peak! We followed our mission to be part of the great Joomla eco system. With this blog post we want to highlight some of our special moments and to give a short preview into 2017.
As the Joomla community is organizing Joomladays all over the world, we didn't want to miss some in our region. We attended Joomla day Germany, J and Beyond in Barcelona and Joomla day Austria. All of these events were really amazing. We met a lot of people from the Joomla community, we just felt on a family gathering.
Here is a link to our presentations on these events.
The biggest change for DPCalendar was the revamped booking system. We made the base to easily implement new payment gateways, getting in different ways of discounts, earlybird or user group discounts. Additionally the layouts got split up to easily override single parts and not whole views.
Our ongoing effort is to support multiple frontend frameworks. In 2016 we introduced 100% compatibility with Boostrap 2 and 3. But that's only the beginning, we have big plans to support more in 2017. Beside that we invested a lot of our resources implementing small features which do make the life of the event manager more convenient. Tons of new configuration options were added to tweak the last bit out of DPCalendar.
DPCalendar is growing massively in 2016. Both in code and in extensions. As for now, we ship 27 extensions in our Premium package. Integrations of external systems like Google calendar has grown to 13 which are developed by us. There are more out there which are developed and maintained by individuals. Our eco system has grown, as more and more developers are integrating DPCalendar into their own extensions.
We invested quite some resources into the next Joomla minor version 3.7. It will contain a new custom fields feature, which is a port of DPFields into the Core CMS. Actually we are stabilizing it and fixing some UX issues. Additionally, Allon joined the new media manager team, to brush up the existing media manager for version 3.8. Development has fully started, where we will introduce some awesome new features.
As development for Joomla 4 has started as well, Allon is helping out with some coding tasks in the closer future. We love Joomla, and that's why we try to help in the core as much as we can.
DPCalendar 6.0 will come with optimized multi frontend framework support. This means, we will provide adapters for Bootstrap 2/3/4 and UIKit for our views. When there will be a need, additional adapters can be implemented with ease. The calendar view will be improved and more payment gateways will be introduced.
As already mentioned, we want to invest some resources into the active development of the core Joomla CMS, to help, making it the best CMS on the planet! We plan to help for Joomla 4 development, spicing up the new media manager and improving custom fields.
So before the year 2016 ends, we want to say THANK YOU to all our existing and new followers, without you, Digital Peak would not exist. Also a THANK YOU to the whole Joomla community. It's so great to be part of it, you make the web really special!!
Kind regards
Allon Moritz aka laoneo
Founder of Digital Peak
