Events Manager has been (prematurely by a few days) released and should be available for download from the wordpress repo, or via our download page.

Events Manager 4.0 brings a huge set of changes that takes the plugin to a whole new level.

Improvements over 3.0

There’s probably more than what’s shown below, we just lost count….

Pretty SEO Permalinks!

• turn on WP permalinks and EM will play nice
• permalinks for everything, events, locations, calendar days, etc.
• If you switch your old EM install to permalinks, EM will automatically do a 301 redirect, so you don’t lose inbound links to your old event pages.

Event Improvements

• Multiple scopes including today, tomorrow, next month and more!
• Events can now have a featured image
• attributes now have preset options you can set which appear as a pull down when creating/editing events, e.g #_ATT{Teacher}{Default Teacher|Teacher 1|Teacher 2}
• Depending on user capabilities events must be approved by an administrator before they are published on the site.
• Events page has a customizable search form.

Major Overhaul of Bookings

• Bookings require registration
  • Anonymous mode allows guests to register and have an account automatically created during the booking.
  • Users can log in to view their booking details.
  • Easily view user activity across various events.
• Multiple Tickets
  • Supports pricing and approval/confirmation, but does not take payments (paypal coming soon, for offline processing, you can leave paid bookings pending until paid).
  • Min/Max space limits, e.g.  for group discounts.
  • Start/End dates, e.g. an early-bird special price
• Attendees Placeholder added

Extended Category functionality

• Events can now have more than one category
• New placeholder for showing a list of categories
• Categories have their own categories list of future events at yoursite.com/eventspage/categories/
• Each category can have it’s own page
• Categories now also have images and a description, along with

Fine grained permission controls with user capabilities

• We now use wordpress capabilities, which means you can assign any user role specific user permissions.
  • The older permissions aren’t as efficient as this, as you can really control what each user can do specifically, so you can recreate the same effect as previous permissions and much more.

More Location Information

• New fields and placeholders : country, postcode, region and state/county
• You can modify location owners
• Locations now have a list page at yoursite.com/eventspage/locations/

BuddyPress Integration

• Add/Edit Events and Locations from BuddyPress
• Manage your event bookings from within your profile.
• Connected to activity timeline when creating events and attending an event.
• One-Click booking button
• Group Events
  • Attach an event to a BuddyPress group and collaborate with the other group admins.

Multisite Compatability

• You can now also centralize all your blog events on one set of tables and display events on your network from the main site.

Even more flexibility for developers!

• Conditional Placeholders
  • You can now use conditional placeholders such as {has_booking}conditional content here{/has_booking} to show/hide content depending on the event. If you know a little PHP, it’s very easy to create custom conditional placeholders too!
• Templates
  • Whilst the various formatting options on the settings page are great, the ability to use templates would give developers a huge amount of flexibility with regards to tweaking event formats and not modifying the original plugin code.
  • By adding files to your theme folder, you can override almost any formatted element that is output on Events Manager, including things like placeholders, booking forms, calendars and more!
• Actions/Filters
  • We have added a filter or action to most functions, and in other important places. Whilst more can be added, and a few might have been missed, it’s very complete and has already enabled us to make some pretty impressive and upgrade-safe modifications to EM.

Other Changes

• Minimum PHP requirement is 5
  • We’re making the minimum requirement php 5. WordPress is doing it very soon, so it makes sense we do it already and get it over with, so we can code using the benefits 5 has to offer. If you still have php 4, your host should change it for you, it’s quick, easy and shouldn’t affect your wp install.
• Contact person doesn’t exist anymore, the event owner is the contact person, someone with edit_others_events can change owners like before with contact person. For those thinking they need an admin of the event and a contact too, well, the idea is to allow multi-user sharing in the future, so the owner can always be the contact and share event with others to admin.
• New setting which controls whether a current event (i.e. an event that started yesterday for x days) is considered a past or future event in your lists.
• 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.
• CSS/JS optimization and consolidation into one file.
• Many many more minor bugfixes and improvements.

Differences that will affect updates from 3.0

Generally speaking, if you depend on bookings with your current setup, you’re best off waiting or testing on another install, unless you’re ok with losing all your booking history.

• Bookings
  • Users must register to book from now, so all booking history and persons table is redundant. Due to the old people table being susceptible to spam, this isn’t done automatically, but you will be notified and allowed to migrate your old bookings and convert your old users into wordpress subscribers.
  • All previous events with bookings will have one open and free ticket, since booking events need at least one ticket.
• Locations
  • Locations now have a split view, all locations and your locations, so in case you’re wondering the missing locations are under “All” if you have the right permissions.
• Permissions and User Capabilities
  • It’s recommended you check out the permissions page, because chances are you need to have a play with that. Admins should have all capabilities.
  • If you use things like role scoper or other plugins that create user roles, bear in mind that they might have an effect on how these capabilities are assigned.
  • Categories now only have two modes, admins only or everyone can edit, as this gets very messy when searching events.
• Contact Person
  • If your contact person is not the owner, some events may revert the contact person details to that of the event owner.

Upgrade Instructions

If you are upgrading from version 3.x you need to update first to one of the most recent 3.x versions later than 3.0.96

It’s recommended you update via the automatic updater, but if doing it manually, it’s the same thing but make sure you deactivate and then reactivate the plugin during installation.

When activating/updating, Events Manager should perform a few small changes:

• Automatically add new slugs to your old events, categories and locations
• Move old category information into a new table for multiple categories
• Create new default tickets for old events with bookings.
• Merges time limit settings for the settings page since it’s just considered a scope type (e.g. future events with 3 month limits are now just events in next 3 months)
• Auto-Approve all old events.
• Set new capabilities (permissions) for users.

If you used RC2 for upgrading, firstly, our apologies, we’re still not sure what went wrong on wp.org. However, when upgrading to 4.0 you should be shown a notice with the option to re-import settings, which just does the above and wipes any previous attempt to import (without affecting your old events and settings).

Once you’ve reached this stage, you’ll want to check a few places to make sure things are running as expected, or correct these known issues:

• If you can’t activate due to an error requesting an update, please try updating to the latest version of 3.x and then update to 4.0
• In the Events > Settings page, you need to check the User Capabilities panel and allow administrators all the possible capabilities, so you can go in and manage events etc.
• Check the events page (on your side) and see if there’s any yellow background events, which probably means your update didn’t go well and events weren’t auto-approved.

If you have further issues, have a look at the forums to see if the issue has been fixed or let us know if you’ve found a new bug.