Today marks the release of ICS Calendar Pro 5.10.0 and ICS Calendar (free) 11.5.9.
ICS Calendar Pro 5.10.0 includes a few big updates:
Most significantly, ICS Events is now turned on by default. I’m really excited about the potential of this new feature. While it’s been available in some form for nearly a year now, I think it’s finally at a stage where it deserves to get a bit more attention. Previously, it was only activated if users found it in the ICS Calendar settings and turned it on. (Don’t worry — if you really don’t want to use it, you can still turn it off!) The new version of ICS Events includes some additional polish on the front-end page templates, to work better with some of the most popular WordPress themes.
In addition to the ICS Events changes, there are significant improvements to Full View especially, again, in how it works with certain popular WordPress themes.
Beyond these two major areas, the update checking mechanism has been completely rewritten, removing the old plugin-update-checker library and switching to a simpler set of custom code. This change should also resolve issues some users have been observing with the WordPress plugin auto-update feature not working for ICS Calendar Pro.
The free version of ICS Calendar has also received a few enhancements and changes in versions 11.5.8 and 11.5.9, both released this week. These changes apply to both the free and Pro versions.
The Bypass nonce on AJAX requests option has been removed, because the nonce itself has now been removed. Nonces are a great way to verify the authenticity of AJAX requests, to prevent unwanted modifications to your site database. But they’re not really necessary for the limited ways ICS Calendar uses AJAX, and in fact they can cause a pretty significant compatibility issue with caching plugins like LiteSpeed. This caching conflict was the reason this option was added in the first place, and since compatibility with caching plugins was really the impetus for using AJAX with ICS Calendar at all, it was clear by now that the nonce had to go.
Some of the less significant changes in 11.5.8 and 11.5.9 include modifications to the System Report to make it more useful and efficient, along with CSS tweaks in the admin pages.
As always, I hope ICS Calendar continues to be of use to you, and I welcome feedback for future improvements!
—Scott