Dedicating Some Focus Time

Posted on August 31, 2012

There’s a never-ending list of features to add and endless ways to make modifications to this plugin. This is what I think makes it such a great plugin, the fact that it’s so flexible.

The upside/downside is that this opens up the doors to suggestions and questions that one would have never thought of initially. Upside because this inspires wonderful new ideas and features, downside because feature requests come flooding in. One particular issue we’re having at the moment is taking on and debating about minor changes that take short time to do, but they add up in the grander scheme of things and prevent us from staying on track.

For this reason, we’re going to put more focus into getting some things checked off our list, which in turn will enable us to whiz through minor features a lot faster in the future. You could call this a ‘soft-freeze’. There’ll never be a good time to do this, so the time is now.

There’s various nagging issues that constantly create bottlenecks, distractions and prevent us running at full-speed. Therefore until around mid-October we’re going to take some time to focus exclusively on these details and get them out the way so we can move on with things. They include (in roughly this order):

• Adding Attendee Forms to Events Manager Pro
  • Every ticket/space will/can require a form for specific attendee information.
  • This is a major feature and the feature we’d like to focus on exclusively whilst working on the plugin itself.
• WPML / EM Add-On (version 1)
  • This has been well overdue and we have a quasi-ready plugin to release on wordpress.org which will help integrate the two plugins.
• Revamp the Website
  • Includes re-design and also a new logo (which we’ve been wanting to change over for a few months now)
• Overhaul of Support Forums
  • There are loads of small improvements to make in order to make providing support easier for us, and receiving support easier for you!
• Overhaul of Membership System
  • We’re changing to a more reliable/flexible membership system, this plugin particularly was responsible for losing us a few weeks/months when we first launched.
• Expanding the plugin Documentation even more
  • An ongoing process, but alongside user documentation, some more developer documentation is way overdue.

How will this affect plugin support?

It won’t! We’ll be monitoring the free and Pro forums just as before. Any bugs in the plugin will still be treated with highest priority and will be fixed asap.

The difference? In the regular cases where minor changes are requested (and often demanded), ETAs on whatever feature, requests for small snippet examples, you’ll be directed here so that we can continue working on the above.  We hope you understand, it’s a few weeks and the end result will be a better plugin!

-Marcus