It’s been a long time coming! Whilst there’s still various things to do, it’s time to start releasing some previews.

A very brief explanation about the changes (much more to come):

• Migrations from version 4 is possible (although untested in MultiSite mode), it should just automatically migrate when you first add the plugin.
• Events and Locations are custom posts and have new URLs, no redirect implemented yet, but WP seems to do a good job of this automatically already.
• You can also have a location less events – see settings page under general settings
• Categories are now WP Categories, but limited to events only (and include color pickers and image uploaders as well), this means that if you use category ids in shortcodes etc., you should change these to the newly created category IDs.
• Shortcodes, Template tags, Placeholders, etc. should work as expected.
• BP/Public submissions now work better than before (will undergo a CSS touch up for final version) and now include images tied to post thumbnails. Same with the anonymous event form.
• Events have tags as well now
• By default, events have archiving disabled, because you can use the old event lists etc. More on this later.
• By default, events and locations assume they’ll use the page.php of themes rather than the usual single.php of a theme, given they usually add the written by y on x information on single post pages. More on this later as well.

developers, some extra info:

• the event, location and category php objects have changed significantly in how they work, the rest are pretty close to being the same as before (the power of OOP)
• If you overrode templates or used custom code, the EM_Event, EM_Location, EM_Category, EM_Booking, EM_Ticket and EM_Ticket_Booking objects use property names that match the database tables rather than shorthands, e.g. $EM_Event->start_date is now $EM_Event->event_start_date (there is a compatability for old templates, but better to update to avoid future problems)
• the events and locations table work almost exactly like they did before, as do the other tables too (tickets etc.). the only table that could go (if not using global MS mode) is the categories table as these are now taxonomies

Known Issues/Limitations

• When migrating, old event/location pictures won’t  show up in the ‘featured image’ bit, but it does work with the usual placeholders (will possibly create a migration wizard for this, to move them into the media library)
• If you’re using MultiSite and global mode, categories aren’t shared cross-site right now, thinking of ways to tackle this.
• Users without admin rights can’t access the location/recurrence windows in the wp-admin area (it works in BuddyPress though), due to the way custom posts work and trying to put these all under one menu item. If you need this, just change line 43 in em-posts.php to return true, but then the recurrences and locations will have their own menu items in the admin area.
• Whilst users can’t actually edit Locations/Events/Recurrences that don’t belong to them, they see the actual edit page (WP Bug possibly?)

Please bear in mind that this is still in early beta stages, so if you’re expecting this to work and can’t deal with bugs… don’t upgrade. Otherwise, happy upgrading! If you find any bugs, feel free to post them on this post comment area or on the forums (but if on forums, make sure you make it clear you’re using the beta when describing your issue).

However in all cases BACK UP YOUR DATABASE!!!! We’ve only done testing on a couple of installs, we’ve got a few test sites with 1000s of events we’ll run the beta on to make sure it upgrades smoothly.

We’ll have more information/documentation on the beta in the coming days, along with further updates and improvements. The current plan is to fix these limitations above, and clean up the user interfaces some more (both admin and public side, we’ll be taking the front-end submission forms out of betas too). Looking very forward to getting this into a stable release, because once this is out, the fun really begins :)

And finally … the download links!

Events Manager Beta 1 – http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/events-manager.5.0b1.zip

Events Manager Pro users should see a link to version 1.4 which will work with the beta on the right sidebar.