A lot has been happening this week here at ICS Calendar HQ. This is the first week where ICS Calendar has started to feel like my full-time job. (Hint: It most definitely is not. Yet.)
Version 9.0.0 was just released 6 days ago, and now we’re already up to 9.3.4! That may be due in part to my somewhat capricious approach to version numbering, as well as my inclination to release updates quickly and often, rather than bundling a lot of changes together in one massive update that requires a huge amount of testing.
In any case, the journey from 9.0.0 to 9.3.4 has been a bit of a bumpy ride, including a very temporary removal from the WordPress Plugin Directory (blink and you’ll miss it!) due to a potential security risk in the original version of the new eventdl feature. The good news is, we were only gone for about 2 hours, while I quickly rolled back the affected functionality, and by the next day (it seems like only yesterday — because it was!) I had totally reinvented the eventdl functionality, leveraging new work I had done in the interim on a different feature: caching raw ICS feed data. The new version of eventdl is not only fixes the potential security risks of the earlier version; it has much less impact on the resource requirements for calendars that use it, and substantially reduces the amount of data sent to the browser.
Along the way, I’ve added a handful of other new features and bug fixes. The changelog tells the story at least as well as I could here, so if you’re interested in learning more about what’s new this week, please check it out!
—Scott