One of the most requested feature for DPCalendar was a more enhanced ticketing workflow. In DPCalendar 5.3, we completely revamped the former attending functionality into a fully featured booking and ticketing workflow. Additionally we refactored the payment gateways to be based on Omnipay, which allows us to implement new payment gateways faster. With over 50 cases solved, working hundreds of hours on the next generation of DPCalendar, we are very proud to publish DPCalendar 5.3 to to the public! Read on about more information of the new features.
If the user books now an event, a whole process is started to trigger payment gateways and create tickets. More notifications E-Mails (eg. to the author) are sent out with important information embedded into the mail content, the ticket is attached as PDF and the event can be imported from the mail into the mail app of the attendee. Multiple tickets can be booked and the prices are reflected directly on the booking mask.
To get a quick overview about the status of the tickets of an event, the author or the admins have a direct link to the tickets, where they can see who has paid and who not. If the author wants to invite some registered users and invite button allows to send out invitations to individual users or whole user groups. The booking is getting the state invited and the user has the possibility to decline or accept the invitation.
The ticketing system is made the way that also none registered users can book seats for events. This means that the contact to the attendee is almost lost after the booking is made. To turn your attendees into followers of your site, we implemented the concept of gradual engagement. This means that after the booking is done, DPCalendar is offering to create an account on your site, to turn the visitor into a user immediately.
After the booking is done and the tickets got paid (if needed), the attendee is getting access to the tickets itself. The attendee can change the address on the ticket and the reminder time before the event happens. Below the details a QR code is displayed. Is the ticket printed out, the guard on the event can scan it and if logged into the web site, the ticket will be marked as checked in. This means if a second visitor is coming with the same ticket, the entrance is not allowed. Additionally a ticket is getting a seat number to easily identify the place the ticket belongs to.
If an event has a price set, then the visitor needs to do a payment. Payments are implemented through Joomla plugins which can be configured in the Joomla plug in manager. We supported till now manual (wire) payments, Paypal or Stripe for credit card payments. Additionally we implemented 2checkout as new payment gateway. The visitor will be redirected directly to the 2checkout site for safe payments. After the payment is done an invoice is sent to the attendee. On the new booking menu item, the user can download later the invoices again as PDF file if needed.
This is only the beginning of a bigger change in the attending/booking feature of DPCalendar. In 2016 we have plans to introduce multiple prices per event, add more payment gateways and to introudce new views like a resource view. Stay tuned for more cool features to come!
Beside that we fixed tons of minor bugs and did some small enhancements for a new experience for the Joomla calendar and event manager. The following list represents the full changelog of the new 5.3 version:
Kind regards
Allon Moritz aka laoneo
Founder of Digital Peak
The aim of DPFields is to be simple to use, low learning curve and seamless integrated. So we thought what should we do next. After some interesting discussions on the Joomla Day Germany and valuable feedback from the Joomla community we are proud to ship version 1.1.0 of DPFields with some amazing new stuff. The main new feature is that fields can be categorized and the output of a field is now rendered in layouts. Read on for more details about the new features.
When you edit an article, the custom fields of DPFields have been shown in a tab with the name "Fields". Now the admin can create "Field Categories" and assign the custom fields to these categories. On the edit mask of the article (or any other component which is integrated into DPFields), are tabs shown with the name of the category instead of the generic Fields name.
To keep backward compatibility if the field is not attached to a category, then the generic name is used as tab name.
The fields have been rendered in their own layout file, which could be easily overridden by the site admin. But the value itself was already set. Now is the value of a field prepared in it's own layout file, which can be overridden in the template. This allows the administrator to directly interfere into the process before a field is rendered. Additionally you can create layout overrides on a per type basis. This means you can just override the SQL custom fields.
To illustrate the power of that new feature, we will give you an example. If you have an image gallery plugin installed which creates an image gallery out of images in your site which do have a specific class name, then you can create an override of the imagelist layout as described here and give it the classname the gallery plugin needs.
DPFields renders the custom fields on the front end automatically during some Joomla event hooks. Which event is now not hard coded anymore, it can be defined in the system plugin settings. You can define that the fields should rendered directly after the title, before or after the description or not at all. Why not at all? If you want to integrate the fields into the description of the article, then you can add some easy to learn mustache code into the description and the fields will be rendered under your control. For not so techie people DPFields provides an editor button, which allows to search for custom fields and to directly enter them into the description.
Beside that we fixed some minor bugs and did some small enhancements for a new experience for Joomla custom fields. The following list represents the full changelog of the new 1.1 version:
Kind regards
Allon Moritz aka laoneo
Founder of Digital Peak
Since the beginning of DPCalendar, custom fields was high on the priority list of features to support. But somehow we wanted to do it right and Joomla was not ready for it. Now we have it! DPFields integrates seamless into DPCalendar (and DPCases, articles, users and modules). Defining your custom fields is now as easy as 123. But we did also some more interesting things in DPCalendar 5.2.
With DPFields we have created an extension suite which integrates seamless custom fields into DPCalendar. Just install DPFields as described here and you will see a new menu item called fields in the DPCalendar sidebar on your Joomla back end. The fields will be rendered on your Joomla front site. You can event customize the output of the fields, render them inside the event description or handle them completely in your layout override. All of that is described here.
You can even define custom fields for the attendee form and locations.
And now comes the burner, it is FREE of charge!!
It is now possible to cache external events (Google calendar, iCloud, Facebook, MS Exchange) in the database beside the Joomla cache. This enables to use the full SQL power while fetching the events. Additionally the server admin can set up a cron job to sync the external events in the back ground. Like that the events will never being fetched during a page request, which will dramatically improve the page speed and the user experience. You will find more details in the cache article on our knowledge base.
Locations are an important part of an event management extension. So we have improved the location management and maps all over DPCalendar. When loading external events, then the locations are imported into the DPCalendar Location Manager this allows the admin to do some adjustments when the locations are displayed for events like from your Google calendar or iCloud account. Additionally it is now possible to show a map on the list and blog view with the events. The markers of the events on the map are not reflecting the color of the event itself for better identification.
The event details view shows now extended location information like the full address, description and custom fields information of the location itself.
One of the strong features of DPCalendar was, is and will ever be the seamless integration into Joomla. On the back end it looks like the article manager and on the front it uses the Bootstrap commands as every extension does, to fully leverage the mobile friendly aspect of your template. Joomla has introduced a smarter sidebar on the back end in Joomla 3.3. With DPCalendar 5.2, we set the minimum required Joomla version to 3.3 to fully integrate into the Joomla sidebar.
Nowadays almost every web site is connected to Facebook page and a Twitter account. Since a couple of releases we do support Twitter auto updates. Now we have the same for Facebook pages. You can define for every Facebook page which native events should publish status updates on the page timeline.
Some small improvements were made all over DPCalendar you would like. For example when you create an event on your Google calendar from within DPCalendar, the correct timezone is set. Or the images of the event can be set now also on the front form. This are only some of the enhancements in this new version.
The following list represents the full changelog of version 5.2:
Best Regards
Allon Moritz aka laoneo
Founder of Digital Peak
The past few posts have been looking at the DAV family of protocols (WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV). Today’s post will look at how DPCalendar implements CalDAV so that you may use it to sync with your other Web-based calendars, scheduling software and various mobile devices.
Here at Digital Peak, we have made the decision that DPCalendar will fully adhere to the CalDAV open standard. Hence, DPCalendar supports the integration of CalDAV calendar services (e.g. iCloud, iCal, ownCloud) and offers CalDAV access to its native calendars (i.e. acts as a CalDAV server as well). When integrating, you can either subscribe to a CalDAV calendar or opt for full synchronisation (either way, changes made in DPCalendar will be reflected in your CalDAV calendars as well).
Like everything else DPCalendar does, integration with CalDAV-aware Web-based calendars (like iCloud or ownCloud) is implemented through a CalDAV plugin (for more information, visit https://joomla.digital-peak.com/documentation/58-dpcalendar/766-caldav-plugin; this essentially is the same way Google calendars are supported). You can even integrate DPCalendar from another site through CalDAV into your existing Joomla site. The plugin also integrates with calendars even if they do not have Web-based interfaces (e.g. desktop calendaring software) as long as they support the CalDAV protocol.
Acting as a client, DPCalendar’s CalDAV plugin supports the editing events on the remote CalDAV server. Essentially, if you have the Joomla permissions to edit the CalDAV details, then you can change the CalDAV integrated events (regardless of which calendars the events come from) directly within Joomla. This means that you can use DPCalendar to manage all of your calendars and schedules directly.
DPCalendar can also act as a CalDAV server for its native events (for a more thorough description of how you can access DPCalendar through CalDAV, click here). In this case, you can use any CalDAV client to gain access to DPCalendar events and schedules. Each individual calendar set up on your Joomla sita via DPCalendar will be shown as its own entity in your CalDAV client. The ability to use DPCalendar as a bridge to your other external calendars (Facebook events, CSV plugin, or all the others) is not yet implemented, although it is technically feasible and will be considered if enough people put it forward as a feature request. However, DPCalendar can act as both a CalDAV client and server at the same time.
So to what kind of uses can you put DPCalendar’s support of CalDAV? The simplest use would be to use your Joomla site as an aggregator of everyone’s schedules; for example, if you want to plan a family dinner, you can simply link to all your relatives’ calendars, and immediately everyone who has access to your website can see who is free and when. For business purposes, you can also use CalDAV to subscribe to calendar feeds that include public holidays for various countries, so that your clients can see when your offices are likely to be open.
You see, there are no limitations? Almost everything is possible, connect DPCalendar to your CalDAV based cloud service or offer your own cloud service for events based on DPCalendar!
After the success of the major version 5.0 of DPCalendar, we made DPCalendar 5.1 available to the public as FREE or paid version. To figure out whet is the different between the different packages check out the comparison table. We fixed over 10 bugs and added over 20 new features and enhancements to DPCalendar 5.1. Some of the highlights are:
For external events, DPCalendar caches the locations now in the database and not anymore in the Joomla cache. This means, if there is something wrong with a location in an external event like from your Google calendar, then you can edit the location in the DPCalendar location administrator to the correct settings. This reduces also the load of Google maps API calls as with the Joomla cache, where the locations have been be re-fetched every two days.
As there are more and more new feature request for the attending part of DPCalendar, we are constantly improving it. MS Exchange and iCalendar attendees are now displayed in the event details view. To get more information about the attendee itself, native DPCalendar attendees do support new location fields like country or street. When a visitor is attending an event, she/he can fill it's address information to beside the already available fields E-Mail and telephone number.
DPCalendar supports structured data out of the box. We made the generated tags 100% W3C valid and improved the markup for better visualization on the SERP's.
As we already mentioned, MS Exchange attendees are now displayed in the event details page. Additionally inline images and event attachments are now available within DPCalendar as well from your corporate MS Exchange server or Outlook 365 account.
Some small improvements were made all over DPCalendar you would like. For example when you change the start date of an event, the end data adapts itself to the increment automatically. Or the CalDAV link is displayed beside the iCal link for easier subscription. It is also possible to filter events for tags or locations in the calendar view. This are only some of the enhancements in this new version.
The following list represents the full changelog of version 5.1:
Best Regards
Allon Moritz aka laoneo
Founder of Digital Peak