Blog

A few important changes in ICS Calendar 10.7.1 and ICS Calendar Pro 4.4.3

Today ICS Calendar version 10.7.1 and ICS Calendar Pro version 4.4.3 are available. I strongly encourage users to upgrade both. (If you are running Pro, be sure to also get the 10.7.1 upgrade to the free version.) The recently introduced Load JS and CSS files on wp_enqueue_scripts action option has been removed, replaced with more…

ICS Calendar Pro v.4.4.2 adds numerous “missing” features to Full view

When ICS Calendar Pro version 4.0 rolled out at the end of December, it introduced the new Full view, based on the FullCalendar library. It was a huge new feature, but it was, necessarily, incomplete. In web development terms, we talk about a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). It’s a good way of approaching a project…

Calendars, caching, and cron

Today I received an email with an interesting question about ICS Calendar and caching. The sender wanted to know about when ICS Calendar retrieves the feed, and whether or not that can be controlled via a cron job. Good question! Here’s an edited and expanded version of my response. The basics of ICS Calendar caching…

ICS Calendar 10.6 and ICS Calendar Pro 4.3 released

Wrapping up our big late December-early January development push, ICS Calendar version 10.6 and ICS Calendar Pro version 4.3 are now available! These versions include a wide ranging number of “under-the-hood” changes as well as some improvements you’ll notice on the page. Some of these were detailed in “teaser” blog posts earlier this week. The…

Updated parameter defaults coming in ICS Calendar 10.6

ICS Calendar has grown and changed significantly since its inception nearly 6 years ago. The number of sites using it continues to grow, and the ways they commonly use it are quite different from what it was even capable of doing when it first launched. As new parameters have been added, the default has always…

Sneak preview: Masonry view coming in ICS Calendar Pro v.4.3

This is a new feature that was spurred by a user request. This user liked what List view offers, but wanted to incorporate Masonry for a more compelling design. Honestly I’m not quite sure how much of a future the classic JavaScript-based Masonry has, as it seems to have been at least partially usurped by…

Deprecation notice: Grid view is deprecated as of ICS Calendar Pro v.4.2.0

Deprecation is a funny word. Outside of the context of programming, it is generally only heard as part of the phrase “self-deprecating.” To be modest or critical of oneself, often in a humorous way. So what is deprecation in the programming sense? Basically it just means, “this still works, but you should stop using it.”…

On the futility of naming colors

This is certainly a “low priority” task, but sometimes my brain gets burned out on the high priority stuff, and I want to just have a bit of fun, while still improving the product. (And, the details do matter.) When I designed the basic CSS for ICS Calendar, I very deliberately chose absolutely neutral colors…

ICS Calendar Pro version 4.0 released!

Thank you for checking out ICS Calendar Pro version 4.0! In addition to some “under the hood” changes that are setting up some future updates, the big change with this version is the introduction of the new Full view. This is an integrated layout with month/week/day/list tabs, that uses the popular open source FullCalendar.io library.…

New in 10.3: AJAX loading

ICS Calendar has been working well for most of its users, but one frequent problem I’ve encountered is caching. If users have a caching plugin installed on their site, especially LiteSpeed, it can be very difficult to get the calendar to update. ICS Calendar has never used AJAX before now, deliberately. AJAX isn’t bad. After…