In short, we are not discouraging you from updating to WordPress 5.0, however when editing events and locations you will still use the Classic Editor which is still included in 5.0.

Whilst Events Manager will work on WordPress 5.0, we have decided to temporarily leverage the fallback mechanism included in WP 5.0 so that editing events will still use the classic editor you have been accustomed to using instead of the Gutenberg editor. This means that Events Manager is not compatible with the Gutenberg editor for now, but you can still manage your events the same way as before whilst still using Gutenberg on your posts, pages etc.

If you are not aware of the upcoming update, WordPress 5.0 will ship with a new editor experience called Gutenberg, which has sparked a lot of controversy in the community. From our point of view, Gutenberg is a great step and in the long run will make WordPress better, however as many other plugin developers have expressed we feel that this release date was rushed with little advanced warning along with changing dates on a daily basis.

We have been following the project for about a year now, and implemented optional support for Gutenberg in Events Manager 5.9.5 which was released 4 months ago. However, Gutenberg has been actively developed and a lot of things keep changing in the code on a daily basis, it still will and the result being that previous compatibility efforts made which worked back then do not work now. You can try this out yourself by adding the following to your wp-config.php file in WP 5.0 or if you already have the Gutenberg plugin installed:

define('EM_GUTENBERG', true);

As you will see, it’s still possible to create events in Gutenberg without issue. The main sticking point for not making support by default is due to the lack of user warnings when events are not complete (such as a missing date) or any other reason for the event not being published after hitting the publish button. A clear method for doing this in the Gutenberg code has not been established yet and is evolving with changes being made only 7 days ago. We have options and workarounds, but these are all workarounds and we’re hoping to have proper solutions implemented rather than adding workarounds which need to eventually be replaced or potentially break as Gutenberg evolves at this rapid pace.

These are interesting times for the WordPress ecosystem, change is not easy but can bring great benefits. We believe this to be the case, and look forward to seeing Gutenberg develop into a loved aspect of the WordPress publishing experience for post, pages, events and more. As the codebase becomes more stable and standardized ways of achieving the functionality we require from the editor becomes available, we also look forward to integrating with it ourselves and enhance the event publishing experience.

Yours Truly,

Marcus Sykes and the Events Manager team

The post WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg Compatibility appeared first on Events Manager for WordPress.

Below is a summary of all changes in the recent updates:

Events Manager 5.9.5 Changelog

• added new Google Maps display options to help prevent cost increases
• fixed booking status emails getting resent when attempting to change status to same status
• fixed potential consent issues with editing/validating bookings made by other registered users
• fixed broken #_LATT custom field attributes for locations
• fixed #_ATT placeholders with dropdown options not selecting default option if not defined
• added em_locate_template_default filter to allow for further template overriding
• fixed certain unsanitized permalink output on admin settings page
• fixed weekly and daily recurrence creation inconsistencies when traversing DST change dates

Events Manager Pro 2.9.4 Changelog

• added support for Google Maps Static API display options and caching for relatively sized static map images

The post Events Manager 5.9.5 and Pro 2.9.4 Released appeared first on Events Manager for WordPress.

Let’s start by saying that we’re fans of Google. They’ve provided lots of valuable services to us all, most of them free to the masses, and have pushed and shaped the internet into a wonderful resource of information and productivity. That said…

As of July 16th, Google Maps has changed the pricing structure of its API by reducing its free limits and significantly increasing the usage price. For many users, this likely won’t affect you, for many others it means Google Maps will no longer be a free service in its current state.

The intention of this post isn’t to alarm you, but the reality is that these changes are alarming for a multitude of reasons (of which we won’t get into here). Our intention here is to put the price changes into perspective, and also inform you about how Events Manager will react to this.

The Price Changes

For many years, Google was quite generous with its free usage allowance but slowly, over the years, this has changed and yesterday marked the biggest one of all. The difference between using the Google Maps API service has jumped up from by %1400 up to %2800 depending on the service used. Yup, that’s not a mistake, we’re talking THOUSAND percents from one day to another!

The bigger impact of this originates from the fact that alongside this price hike, they’ve also significantly lowered their free allowance which translates roughly to a %750 decrease in value/usage allowance for loading dynamic maps, or a whopping %2600 decrease in free map loads! Previously, you were able to load Google Maps on your site 25,000 a day (750,000 a month), now were you to only load Maps on your site, you’d have a 28,000 load allowance per month.

We’re referencing Google’s old pricing and comparing it with the new pricing. It’s hard to put this into numbers, because aside from a previously reasonable API pricing structure and (admittedly) generous free usage limits, the pricing structure was fairly simple to understand, whereas now every API call has a different price.

To put this into perspective, we’ve made some conservative (i.e. low) daily usage estimations for a somewhat popular events site and compare the price difference, based on a 30-day month.

That’s a new $63 monthly cost for a site where their event/location pages containing maps are loaded 1000 times a day (not visitors, page loads), 300 searches are attempted per day using the location auto-completion feature, and adding 10 locations per day. We consider this to be fairly conservative and likely a quota many users will meet. If your traffic doubled, your bill jumps to $325, if it goes up tenfold, that becomes $2145.

How to manage and reduce API usage costs with Events Manager

We have created some new documentation pages that describes our new map load types, what APIs we use and how to optimize API usage.

Sadly, our hands our tied with regards to Google. If you want to continue using Google Maps as-is, you may face some steep cost increases depending on how much traffic your site gets. We have little option but to roll with the punches and attempt to provide the best balance between functionality and price possible.

Fortunately, we have figured out some ways that’ll drastically reduce (or mitigate entirely) the cost of using the API based on this current pricing structure. We’ve done this mainly by providing alternatives to dynamic map loads, which are likely to be the most expensive and crucial feature to website owners.

With Events Manager 5.9.5 you can opt to use Embedded Maps , which is a slightly different way of loading maps, but is completely free. The downside is that you have little control over what gets displayed on the map and around your location. For many, this will be an attractive option though.

With Events Manager Pro 2.6.4, we have also included integration with Google Static Maps, which is significantly cheaper to load than Dynamic Maps, affording you much higher monthly usage limits, along with caching which will optimize load times and further help stretch your budget. Aside from this, to provide a good user experience to your visitors, we also provide linking and click actions on these static maps so that users could open the map on a (free) google.com maps page, or load a dynamic/embedded map when clicked on. The idea here is to reduce the loading of expensive maps to when specifically requested.

Thinking ahead…

These price changes were only announced just over 2 months ago, affording us little reaction time. Our primary priority was to react accordingly with the current Google integrations we had, in order to reduce usage costs to plugin users as much as possible. We were forced to shift our focus from other features we’re currently working on to address this, we’ll be shifting that focus back on some awesome features (although one actually includes some Google API integration :/).

However, whilst we will still certainly continue to integrate with Google services, this recent price change has prompted us to think about where we go from here…  The harsh reality is that Maps and location-based services will not be free in larger volumes, but there are alternatives, many alternatives which are certainly significantly cheaper at higher volumes.

We have been looking at multiple alternatives, talking to Mapping service providers and are still exploring our options. However, one thing is certain, we will over time work towards decoupling the Google Maps functionality in Events Manager so that other services can hook into Events Manager and take over to display maps instead. This won’t be immediate, but it is now something we’ll be keeping in mind with every key we press whilst dealing with anything location-related. We look forward to providing you with further mapping-related announcements in the near future!

The post Google Maps API Pricing Changes (and how it probably affects you) appeared first on Events Manager for WordPress.

Both updates fix a few issues that arose from consent boxes and different contexts where events, locations and bookings are submitted/edited. We’ve also ensured that anonymously submitted events that have attached locations will now store that information on both objects, allowing them to act independently from each other for exporting/erasing personal data.

Events Manager 5.9.4 Changelog

• added em_rewrite_rules_array filter for final permalink rule manipulation
• fixed privacy consent blocking certain actions such as single booking button and admin-side submissions
• fixed fatal errors when showing the consent checkbox in WordPress 5.9.5 and earlier
• fixed the quick booking button not working in ajax search results
• fixed privacy policy consent form label not being translatable for multilingual sites
• fixed inconsistent date headers in certain situations with UTC manual offset dates
• fixed incorrect link to .eot dashicon file for IE11
• added anonymous submitter data to locations for new event submissions and integrated this with GDPR export/erase tools
• fixed location slug blanks when directly published from front-end via submitting an event
• added default ical and rss feed limits to avoid overloading as number of events grow
• corrected docs to include ‘recurrences’ search attribute
• added timezone pre-formatting to functions that produced incorrect output for timezone date placeholders
• fixed default categories not being applied for events with no categories
• fixed locations being selectable for events in other blogs within a multisite global mode when locations don’t all reside on main blog

Events Manager Pro 2.6.3.1

• fixed data privacy consent checkboxes showing on both individual event and checkout pages for multiple bookings

The post Events Manager 5.9.4 & Pro 2.6.3.1 appeared first on Events Manager for WordPress.

As we announced a few weeks ago, we’ve been aware of the upcoming GDPR laws for some time now, as well as the work being done on WordPress in preparation for helping site owners become compliant in time before the law comes into effect. “In time” just so happens to be tomorrow (May 25th 2018)! We appreciate that this may be overwhelming for many, and we hope that these new tools make the process a little easier.

All of this will work out of the box when you update, the main part involving some work and consideration is the privacy policy which requires you to review our suggestions and amend if necessary.

Whilst this release is very close to the deadline (although if you check your inbox, it seems the whole world is too!), we do believe it was worth waiting to integrate as much as possible with WordPress’ tools rather than implementing our own GDPR tools. The overall experience for site owners will be a lot smoother with regards to EM and WP, as you only need to look in one place when required to export and erase personal data.

We recommend you check out our settings page documentation, we will also be putting together additional information and guidelines regarding considerations you want to make whilst planning your overall privacy strategy in relation to Events Manager.

Privacy Features

Today’s release provides control over exactly what personal data from Events Manager will get exported and erased by WordPress’ Privacy Tools in our settings page. When exporting someone’s personal data, it can also include Event, Location and Booking information. Moreover, this will also include all the information gathered by Pro features including:

• payment transactions
• attendee fields
• custom booking form fields
• custom user fields
• multiple booking information
• custom event emails within the user-owned events

We’ve additionally provided an easy way to add consent checkboxes to our forms that obtain user information.

Aside from that, Events Manager also integrates with WordPress’ privacy policy generator, so you can use the sample text we provide within your policy.

That’s it for now! As more features get added and there’s further clarification about some of the GDPR ambiguities, we’ll certainly adapt and provide more options to help you create GDPR rules that fit your requirements. We wish you luck with your GDPR preparations!

The post Events Manager GDPR Releases (5.9.3 & Pro 2.6.3) appeared first on Events Manager for WordPress.

Update May 22nd 2018: 

We expect to release an update today tomorrow, and whilst we’re cutting it pretty close, as it’s now taking its final shape the work involved to get ‘compliant’ will likely be minimal. We’ll be hooking into WP’s export/erasure tools and insert checkboxes to the booking/event forms automatically.

The only initial action on your part is just revising your privacy policy which we’ll already generated text for if you’ve not created one yet. If you already have a policy, we’ll also add a sample of text on our release blog post.

In short, Events Manager (and Pro) is currently not  GDPR compliant, but it will be, and in time for the deadline.

What is the GDPR?

The internet is abuzz with a new acronym – GDPR. This is a new EU Regulation that will come into force on May 25th 2018, which expands on the previous EU Data Protection laws and imposes further responsibilities upon any website owner that interacts with EU users in any way where personal data is collected.

Whilst this doesn’t affect everyone in the world, it will affect the vast majority of websites that are open to the international public. This is particularly true for Events Manager, since information is collected from users any time an event is submitted or a booking is made. Unless you close your site to the whole of Europe, it’s likely you’ll need to be prepared for compliance.

Is WordPress GDPR compliant?

Well, the answer is the same as ours… not yet. The WP GDPR compliance team is made of some brave volunteers who have been hard at work discussing, planning and implementing these features for many months now. Today, a beta is scheduled for the 4.9.6 release with the focus on GDPR with an expected release date near the GDPR deadline.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that WordPress will never be ‘Compliant’ out-the-box. No plugin will automatically make your site GDPR compliant, as the burden lies on the website owner to ensure they meet the GDPR requirements. However, it will provide you with additional tools to allow you to comply with the GDPR requirements.

So… how is Events Manager preparing for GDPR compliance?

Like WordPress, we need to provide you with tools and information that’ll allow you to be GDPR compliant.

We are well aware of the upcoming WP GDPR implementation guideline and have been for some time now, following their progress. However, we have held back from implementing anything just yet as we’re keen to integrate with the upcoming GDPR compliance tools currently being produced for WordPress in general, rather than creating our own separate tools. We feel that the more we integrate with the core GDPR tools, the less confusing it’ll be for everyone.

We’re looking forward to exploring the upcoming betas and RC’s as we integrate and implement our own compliance measures to ensure you, our users, can meet your compliance requires as smoothly and painlessly as possible.

How is everyone else preparing for GDPR compliance?

You may be thinking that we’re all leaving this pretty close to the deadline. Well, we’re not alone here, and neither are you!

Take a look at your inbox for proof… You’re probably receiving an unusually high number of emails over the past and upcoming weeks from the various online services  you’re signed up to regarding updated privacy policies(including the big guys like Google, Twitter, Facebook et. al). Some do and some don’t mention the GDPR, but generally speaking, everyone is dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s weeks before the deadline arrives.

Stay tuned…

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be reviewing our plugin features and doing everything possible to ensure that you can use Events Manager and adhere to the new laws. We’ll be following up once this is ready.

The post Upcoming GDPR Compliance Laws appeared first on Events Manager for WordPress.

We’ve reached out to authorize.net in the hopes that they will provide some sort of announcement to clarify why these changes were made and why developers (including ourselves) were not given prior warning, assuming this wasn’t simply an error on their part.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused, unfortunately this was out of our hands and we’ve remedied the situation as quickly as possible.

As mentioned in our earlier post, we don’t want to force customers with expired licenses to renew just for a trivial fix of this nature, so here’s the updated instructions to fix previous versions of Events Manager Pro:

1. Visit this page, and save it to your computer (which should save as file cert.pem)
2. Upload the file to your site within the Events Manager Pro plugin folder, replacing the file /add-ons/gateways/anet_php_sdk/lib/ssl/cert.pem
3. Change line 45 in /add-ons/gateways/anet_php_sdk/lib/AuthorizeNetAIM.php so the URL on that line becomes https://secure2.authorize.net/gateway/transact.dll
4. Change lines 20 and 21 on/add-ons/gateways/anet_php_sdk/lib/AuthorizeNetSOAP.php so that the URLS become https://api2.authorize.net/soap/v1/Service.asmx?WSDL and https://api2.authorize.net/soap/v1/Service.asmx respectively.

The post Pro 2.6.2.1 fixes (more) authorize.net errors appeared first on Events Manager for WordPress.

This is a required update for anyone using Authorize.net for payments. However, for those with expired licenses who do not wish to renew, for whatever reason, we do not consider this update as a ‘reason to renew’ (whilst we’d love it if you do!) and we’d like to share how to fix this yourself with some easy steps:

[edit: 2018-05-02 22:32PM CET – please update to 2.6.2.1 and view our follow-up post for updated instructions]

1. Visit this page, and save it to your computer (which should save as file cert.pem)
2. Upload the file to your site within the Events Manager Pro plugin folder, replacing the file /add-ons/gateways/anet_php_sdk/lib/ssl/cert.pem

These two steps will fix connection issues to the Authorize.net service.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused. Upon further investigation, this seems to be a change that Authorize.net implemented on May 1st 2018 yet failed to announce it (they usually announce breaking changes of this kind months ahead of time), and has caught a lot of their customers by surprise.

The post Pro 2.6.2 Release fixes authorize.net errors appeared first on Events Manager for WordPress.

Events Manager 5.9.2 Changelog

• fixed some instances where PHP 5.2 outputs incorrect times due to other plugins changing server timezones
• fixed scope issues with PHP 5.2 when calculating start/end of month dates
• fixed potential issues with manual offsets when other plugins change server timezones whilst saving events, particularly in PHP 5.2
• added EM_CACHE constant which if defined as false will disable caching
• fixed issues when changing times of an EM_DateTime object with large manual offset timezones may cause incorrect dates (fixes some weekly recurrence pattern issues)
• added notice when viewing bookings made in another language
• added booking admin table column for language used in booking
• fixed some minor PHP notices preventing event submissions/edits with a new location if display_errors are enabled
• updated EM_Notices to use new class names for notices output in WP Dashboard
• added filters for all post type and custom taxonomy arrays used in initial post type and custom taxonomy registration functions (see em-posts.php)

Events Manager Pro 2.6.1 Changelog

• fixed manual bookings not adding correct new user information when name/email/profile fields are set to not be displayed or editable
• fixed reminder emails not getting translated into booked language
• fixed minor PHP warning on transactions table when no transactions to display

The post Events Manager 5.9.2 and Pro 2.6.1 Released appeared first on Events Manager for WordPress.

Whilst we’ve had beta versions of this new feature since late last year, it’s pretty much impossible to test every server setting, plugin/theme and EM settings combination and consequently once released to the general public we started experiencing various issues with regards to the new features when running under specific settings/servers.

Thankfully, those experiencing issues are in the minority and none of these are issues we’ve come across so far can’t be resolved. We’ve been hard at work this weekend collaborating with various users who reported these issues to make the necessary tweaks.

The two major areas causing problems have been:

• Users running plugins that change the server default timezone and not switching it back, resulting in event times being displayed (but not saved) as a few hours off. WordPress switches the timezone to UTC by default.
• Multisite admins that update the plugin and directly proceed to visit the ‘Update Blogs’ page experienced ‘missing’ events. Visiting subsite admin pages after updating the plugin does not cause this.

In both cases, we’ve fixed the problem by mitigating the possibility of other plugins interfering and by adding some tools for network admins to set things right.

For those who upgraded to 5.9 and experienced the MultiSite issue, you’ll be asked to run the timezone reset feature from Network Admin > Events Manager  > Admin Tools. Simply choose ‘All Blogs’ to apply the reset to, and click the ‘Reset Timezones’ button, and all events should reappear on all your sites. If you have lots of sites (we tested on an install with 98 sites) this may take a while and if your server times out, don’t worry, you can visit the reset function again and you can choose to resume where it left off.

We’d like to thank all the users on the support forums that worked with us to help us reproduce the problem ourselves, and hope that now everyone can enjoy the use of timezones on Events Manager!

Project Gutenberg

Whilst we were at it, we snuck in a little side-feature among other fixes/tweaks… support for Gutenberg! If you are testing out the new editor that’ll soon be part of WordPress, try adding this line to your wp-config.php file:

define('EM_GUTENBERG', true);

As the time draws nearer to release, we’ll look at making the meta boxes look more inline with the editor styling, but for now, all the EM features are at least available in the Gutenberg editor.

Changelog

As usual, here’s the changelog breakdown:

• fixed the & operator in category search attribute not working correctly in MultiSite Global Tables mode
• added fix/workaround for any code that changes the timezone from WP’s UTC timezone during runtime
• fixed multisite upgrade issues with timezones
• added option to reset timezones for all blogs on multisite and also reset each blog to its individual WP timezone
• changed default subscriber capabilities so they can’t submit events by default
• added option to resume failed timezone resets on multisite blogs
• added upgrade warning for multisite users who upgraded to 5.9 and had timezone update errors
• fixed (deprecated with backward compatibility) shorthand EM_Booking object properties such as ‘status’ not having values after 5.9 update
• fixed recurrence pattern date miscalculations on sites where a plugin/theme changes the default server timezone after WP sets it to UTC
• added gutenberg support with define(‘EM_GUTENBERG’, true); defined in wp-config.php
• fixed new tickets not being added to previously created recurring event where bookings were previously disabled
• added tweaked EM_DateTime functionality so functions that might return false in DateTime set valid property to false before returning object for chaining

The post Events Manager 5.9.1 appeared first on Events Manager for WordPress.