April has been a really busy month for me, mostly away from ICS Calendar Pro, so it hadn’t occurred to me until this morning that the announced release date of WordPress 7.0, April 9, had long since come and gone.
Well, I won’t get into the reasons for why WordPress 7.0 has been delayed (or my numerous opinions on the reasons and overall direction of the project at the moment). Instead, this all led me to reflect on the past development timeline of ICS Calendar Pro.
The first release of the free version was in May 2017. Development on ICS Calendar Pro officially kicked off with version 0.1.0 in September 2019, and ICS Calendar Pro 1.0.0 debuted in March 2020.
After that initial 6-month development period, I came up with a general idea that I would like to release a major version update — incrementing that first digit — about once a year.
Unlike WordPress, which uses a version numbering system I find bewilderingly meaningless, ICS Calendar and ICS Calendar Pro use a logical, outline-style numbering system, with the decimals representing the hierarchy, and the numbers in each level being allowed to go into multiple digits if needed:
(Major version) . (Minor version) . (Feature updates) . (Bug fixes)
I occasionally goof in the numbering, such as when I released ICS Calendar Pro 6.1.0 when it really should have been 6.0.1, but of course, once a number is out there, you can only increment, never decrement, or the updater won’t work!
Anyway, I just spent a few minutes reviewing the changelog to see how well I’ve adhered to my “one major version update per year” plan. Here’s how it all breaks down:
| Version | Release Date | Development Time |
|---|---|---|
| 0.1.0 | September 2019 | N/A |
| 1.0.0 | March 2020 | 6 months |
| 2.0.0 | April 2021 | 1 year 1 month |
| 3.0.0 | September 2021 | 5 months |
| 4.0.0 | December 2022 | 1 year 3 months |
| 5.0.0 | May 2024 | 1 year 5 months |
| 6.0.0 | December 2025 | 1 year 7 months |
Version 3 had its quick turnaround because it was basically an incremental update, but it got the bump because I had completely redesigned the ICS Calendar logo and branding. But it’s clear that, in general, it’s taking more than a year to produce most of these major version updates. In fact, the time seems to increase by 2 months with each update. If that pattern continues, we could expect version 7.0 to be available in September 2027.
Will it take that long? Hard to say, especially since I haven’t even begun the development roadmap for major new features. Development of version 6 was delayed by at least a month due to a spate of odd HTTP 429 errors users of Google Calendar on a very specific set of hosting providers in Europe were experiencing. That came on the heels of a Microsoft Outlook issue with User Agent strings last August.
In short, there are factors outside of my control that I often need to adapt and respond to. The tech world is changing faster right now than it has in nearly a generation, so it’s a bit hard here in April 2026 to know for sure what ICS Calendar Pro users will need more than a year from now, and what other surprises might appear along the way.
My approach to development of the plugin is to respond to the real-world needs of my users. If you have any suggestions for new features, the support request form is a great way to pass those along.
As always, thanks for using ICS Calendar Pro!
—Scott