Events Manager 5.9, Pro 2.6 Released

Posted on March 23, 2018

We’re happy to announce the arrival of our new updates, which finally introduces timezone support as an official feature! We’ve been working on and refining this new feature since late last year. Given that it’s a big shift on how we handle dates and times internally it’s a big change under the hood. See our new documentation page for more information about timezone support.

We’ve had a working dev version out for everyone to test with for the past few months and we’ve had the chance to see it in action on many websites, we’re pretty confident that this new update will go smoothly for the vast majority. For those that do experience any update issues, particularly about how event times are displayed on your event pages, we’re keeping a close eye on both the free and Pro support forums for update-related issues including over the weekend.

Whilst a seemingly trivial feature, this opens up some powerful possibilities, and one thing we’re working on already (and in fact nearing final stages of releasing a beta) is an importer/exporter plugin, which currently imports events from FaceBook, Meetup.com, CSV and iCal imports from multiple sources. One nagging issue blocking progress when importing events from around the world was… timezones! Now that’s out the way, we expect to polish up this new add-on and we’ll release it as a closed beta to Pro customers in the coming weeks.

We hope you enjoy this new feature, and look forward to your feedback! Here’s a list of changes made to both plugins in the latest releases:

Events Manager 5.9 Changelog

• added timezone support
• added new admin notice interface objects
• added new EM_Options option storage class
• fixed some PHP strict warnings regarding parent/child class method signatures
• fixed taxonomy pagination issues in AJAX (affecting tags specifically)
• fixed shortcode not getting parsed properly due to fix in 5.8.1.1 attempting to parse shortcode with supplied formats
• fixed non-standard YYYY-M-D date formats not being accepted in scope arguments
• improved multisite blog update interface
• added modular update logic to admin pages for future features
• further hardening against sanitizing potential XSS strings
• fixed non-standard YYYY-M-D date formats not being accepted in scope arguments
• fixed duplicate slug issues when duplicating events
• removed all references of create_function for php 7.2 compatibility
• fixed documented ‘postcode’ search attribute not filtering results by that value
• fixed event duplication not copying other plugin meta data, such as ACF
• fixed EM_Bookings::get() producing SQL error if passing an array of booking IDs
• added em_event_post_scope_meta_query filter for admin-side custom scopes
• fixed bug where blank start/end times of tickets and booking cut-offs default to 12AM instead of event start time
• fixed preview mode not reflecting new event description
• fixed broken ical permalinks for individual subcategories
• changed recurrence warning strips from green to orange/blue at top of admin pages
• added ‘ticket total’ column to bookings export and split ‘ticket price’ from ‘total’ booking price when exporting split by ticket type
• fixed issues with caching not getting updated other plugins data such as ACF and possibly others
• fixed issue where logged out user didn’t see login feedback message on booking form under certain setting combinations
• added EM_ML::restore_current_lang and EM_ML::switch_to_lang functions
• fixed language detection of bookings not being done early enough

Events Manager Pro 2.6 Changelog

• reduced number of redundant booking form SQL calls on booking admin pages
• optimized pending counts of bookings for gateways by avoiding loading/looping through all bookings and using SQL queries instead
• made adjustments for timezone changes in EM
• fixed custom event emails of a translation getting deleted in WPML when saving the original translation
• fixed various PHP warnings/notices and PHP 7.2 compatibility issues
• fixed partial refunds in paypal sending a ‘pending’ email
• fixed ‘resume payment’ button for paypal in MB mode not including all events booked at once
• changed all recaptcha on booking forms to v2 without the need for a SDK requiring higher PHP versions than WP minimum
• fixed minor coupon rounding issue in description text
• fixed attendee emails not getting sent to logged in users when booking forms have non-editable user fields
• fixed duplicate custom email and coupon records in recurrences resulting in incorrectly saved data
• renamed recaptcha form editor private/public key labels to match site/secret key labels on recaptcha admin site
• optimized transactions lookup for bookings with a specific ticket
• fixed some inconsistencies when saving checkboxes and other multiple choice attendee form fields with HTML entities
• fixed multiple selection user fields not being saved to user account during a booking and only to booking object
• added option to reserve bookings pending payment on PayPal
• fixed anonymous@ emails being cc’d in admin emails when Multiple Bookings mode is active
• fixed custom emails for offline gateway not defaulting to the custom ‘pending’ template if a custom ‘awaiting payment’ template not defined
• fixed unexpected behaviour when pressing back button from paypal and attempting to submit a second time
• fixed coupon code issues derived from duplicate codes by preventing creation of non-unique coupon codes
• fixed coupons and gateway options appearing in certain instances when an event is free
• added price adjustment calculation functions for single bookings within a multiple booking instance to allow calculation of proportional totals after discounts/surcharges applied to overall booking
• fixed ‘Total Paid’ booking table field showing 0 when in Multiple Bookings mode
• fixed various multilingual and cascading/precedence issues with custom emails
• removed EM_Custom_Emails_Admin get_gateway_default_values()/get_gateway_mb_default_values() and unified in get_default_email_values(),
• tweaked custom emails so offline gateway ‘pending’ custom email will be used if no gateway ‘awaiting offline’ template is defined,
• added pending Multiple Booking email template,
• changed option dbem_multiple_bookings_contact_email_subject/body to dbem_multiple_bookings_contact_email_confirmed_subject/body,
• fixed potential WPML multilingual issues with saving certain setting pages when in another language