About Us
Events Manager is a free and feature-filled events plugin for the WordPress platform, providing the ability to publish events, locations and manage bookings among many other features.
Events Manager Pro is an add-on to Events Manager, which extends the functionality of the free plugin to provide a further layer of tools and features for professional event organizers. Pro uses the very same actions and filters in Events Manager, which any developer can use to extend the plugin as they see fit (a testament to EM’s flexibility).
Events Manager remains an integral part of the Pro plugin and therefore we will always remain committed to maintaining, supporting and adding more features to the free plugin because Pro depends on it. Given we started this plugin as a labor of love, we don’t ever intend on changing this approach!
History
Events Manager originally started as a labor of love in early 2008. Originally developed for Davides’ Irish-folk band, once published for others to use on WordPress.org, demand for this great plugin immediately began to grow and requests for new features began to pile in.
In mid-2009, Marcus came across this plugin whilst developing an events solution for a client, and couldn’t help but add his own improvements to make it suit his needs. Given his enjoyment for writing WordPress plugins, Marcus quickly came to realize the potential of this plugin and began expanding it in his free time. Eventually, Davide handed over the reigns to Marcus due to other commitments and he’s been maintaining and providing support for Events Manager since.
Two complete rewrites, new features and many updates later, demand and time required for maintaining, updating and supporting this plugin quickly outgrew the amount of free time available. Feature sponsorship and donations also didn’t make up for the time needed to make EM all it can be , so a decision was made to launch Events Manager Pro in March 2011.
Major Contributors
Marcus Sykes
Marcus has been a Web Consultant since 2001 and is the lead developer of Events Manager since 2009. With a love for all that is internet, Marcus has helped many small to medium businesses improve their online presence by (re)designing, developing custom solutions, and marketing websites online. Aside from Events Manager, he’s also developed various other wordpress plugins.
Davide Benini
Davide is the original creator of Events Manager. He originally created the plugin for his Irish folk band, and kept maintaining it until the end of version 2. Davide has moved his attention to making awesome applications for iPhone and iPad.
Ben Dunkle
Ben Dunkle, the author of the original WordPress icon sets, has created the Events Manager 2.0 icon that you’ll see in the menu. That is an honor, and we are very grateful to him. Additionally, he’s created our new icons in 2012 as well as helping us revamp our website with his design magic!
Translations
Translations are provided by volunteers. Here’s a list of our contributors who we are very thankful for:
- British – Jeff Cole
- Catalan – Gaspar Alomar Trias
- Chinese – Leonardo Losoviz
- Czech – Michael Hrdlička
- Danish – Kim Hansen
- Dutch – Pieter De Decker, Arnout Eykelhoff
- Finnish – Jan-Erik Finlander and the Somea Ltd team, Joni Lehto, Otto Kekäläinen, Seravo Oy
- French – Luc Capronnier, Amélie Mercatante
- German – Heiner Schäfer, Alex Sebastian
- Greek – Manolis Tzanidakis
- Hebrew – Dimitriy Makarenko
- Hungarian – Bálint Kriván
- Italian – Davide Benini
- Japanese – Kenta Sakamoto, Margy Mutoh
- Portuguese (Brazil) – George Doria
- Portuguese (Portugal) – Marcos Felipe
- Russian – Anon, Evgeniy Efimenko, Александр Цинкалов
- Slovak – Juius Pastierik
- Slovenian – Anna Dunkan
- Spanish – David Markham
- Swedish – Tommy Wahlund
Previous Sponsorship
Back in the day when this plugin was getting started, various people contributed to the develop new features for Events Manager, we thank them for their efforts:
- Heiner Schäfer sponsored development for BuddyPress features coming into version 5
- Brian Richards has been encouraging the upgrade to EM 2.0.
- Tyler Suchmann has also sponsored the development. Thank him for the multi-location map.
- Liden & Denz for sponsoring the latest 2.x features developed by Marcus
- Sara Cormeny for sponsoring a massive bugfix session which brought to EM 2.1
