February has been full of fixes and improvements.
Most importantly, we finally fixed a timezone issue that causes events to jump timings, but only for people living in specific timezones in the US.
We’ve also made EventKoi stable at scale. Previously, we noticed that the plugin would crash if someone had 10k events on their site. Now, you can be confident that EventKoi still works normally even if you do happen to have tens of thousands of events on your site.
Finally, we’ve implemented automated testing. All of our new releases have to pass phpcs coding standards before shipping. We also run unit tests that will help us catch any regressions like date/time issues before pushing out a new release.
One of the biggest concerns people have when using newer technology is that the early versions tend to be more buggy. I think we’ve finally crossed that invisible hurdle and I’m proud to say that the plugin is much more stable now and no longer in that “only for early adopters” stage.
Of course, no software is ever perfect, so I’d like to highlight that not only are we more stable, but we continue to provide excellent and enthusiastic support. So if you happen to find a bug, just let us know and we will fix it as soon as we can.
Beaver Builder
We’ve also shipped our Beaver Builder integration! I’m particularly excited about 2 features:
- With Beaver Builder’s Themer extension, you can build event templates directly inside Beaver Builder and assign them to EventKoi events.
- We’ve hooked directly into BB’s Loop module. So this means you can leverage all the power that comes from their own Loop module but have it query EventKoi events. Even recurring events.
The second one took us a lot of time to figure out, but this means you can create super specific event lists directly in Beaver Builder.
Also, the team at Beaver Builder has been incredibly helpful. Fun fact, Jamie from Beaver Builder created the first ever support ticket on the WordPress.org repo for EventKoi Lite.
Integrations are a never ending thing. There are always ways that we can integrate more deeply with another plugin. So if there’s a feature you wish we built for Beaver Builder (or any other page builder), just let us know.
A personal favourite tiny improvement – Setting the time that the day starts on
We use FullCalendar as the starting point for our calendar, and have made significant modifications and improvements to it over time.
Recently, we made one change that I’m particularly happy about.
The old way: Day starts at 12am by default
In the standard FullCalendar set up, in week view, the day starts at 12am by default. This has always frustrated me because most events take place in the day, not the middle of the night! The 12am default means most people are greeted with a blank calendar and have to scroll down to about 8am to see events.
The new way: You choose what time your day starts
Now, we added a setting at both the individual calendar level and a global level that lets you decide what time you want your day to start.
So, if you work in a library that only opens at 8am, you can set your day to start at 8am.
And if site visitors want to see time slots before 8am, they can always scroll up.
This is such a small change but the old 12am default setting always bugged me, so I’m really happy we finally changed it.
Coming soon
Hooking directly into page builder’s loop blocks is new for us and took us along time to figure out. Now that we’ve successfully done it for Beaver Builder, we’re really excited to build this out for Elementor, Bricks and Divi.
We’re also still working on tickets. This is a gigantic feature for us and it will take some time to complete, so you’ll probably see tickets in the “coming soon” section for awhile.