Beta Update 2011-04-15

Posted on April 15, 2011

The wordpress svn trunk has just been updated with the latest beta version. Quite a few improvements since the last version. Aside from random bugfixes, here’s some major improvements:

• Migration scripts for PEOPLE and BOOKINGS (optional)
  • Those using Events Manager 3.x could in theory upgrade to this (NOT RECOMMENDED ON PRODUCTION) but I would really appreciate anyone willing to take the plunge on a test server or low traffic website and letting us know how it went.
• iCal support with caching (still experimental)
  • just access your WP site e.g. yoursite.com/events.ics
• The events page will just replace CONTENT if present, or just the whole page if not, meaning you can add text above and below your events that persist across lists, events, etc.
• The capabilities list is easier to read
• Booking approvals (not sure now if that was present before, but now it certainly is!), users must have the publish_events capability to publish posts without approvals.
• We now have templates!
  • You’ll notice the templates folder, there’s some documentation in the readme.txt files in each folder, but now you can overwrite most parts of EM output with php files located in your theme folder,  similar to BuddyPress.
• Anonymous Bookings (optional of course)!
  • Users get an automatically generated username and password based on their email if they don’t login before booking
• Single booking button for free events.
  • Probably most useful in buddypress, but you can now have a single button logged in users will see and clicking on that books one place with nice AJAX effects
• Events Filtering Form
  • Filter events by search, category, state, country, and start/end dates
  • What’s even better is you can customize this using the new template system
• You can now also change location owners, like with events
• Simple single ticket mode
  • You can enable a mode that will allow events to only create one ticket per booking, with the same restrictions available to multi-tickets
• There’s now a way to choose and modify your permalink ( for those that say it doesn’t work like the WP slug chooser in posts, that’s because it’s not )
• A few CSS improvements to the forms and to the BP member area.
• Tickets and Booking options available in BuddyPress event creator
• Front-end booking management (still in progress, links need updating and CSS needed)
• All CSS and JS files are consolidated, and will be minified when stable (sources will be available in another file)

Hope you enjoy the changes! If you already have the beta installed, replace it with this one and de/reactivate.

And for those of you wondering, here’s a list of what’s coming up shortly:

• BuddyPress group events
• Further improvements to the BuddyPress interface.
• More event scopes, e.g. today, tomorrow’s events, etc.
• Feature event image, like with locations
• Featured category image and description
• Various small bug fixes.
• And maybe a couple more surprises :)

For those needing tutorials to get this going, I intend to write some soon but this is still a beta so currently development takes priority. If you’re not comfortable experimenting in WordPress it’s best you wait a bit more.