ICS Calendar

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New experimental feature in ICS Calendar v. 10.8.7: combinemultiday… feedback welcomed!

March 13, 2023

Today’s release of ICS Calendar version 10.8.7 introduces a new parameter for your shortcode:

combinemultiday="true"

What does this do? If your calendar often contains events that span multiple days, you may have noticed that, until now, those events were displayed as a series of discrete individual all-day events, repeating on each day in the range.

Why was it built this way? Well, it has to do with the early evolution of the plugin, which was not initially designed to handle multi-day events at all. When the capability was incorporated, it was already “too late” to design the Month and Week view templates to allow individual events to span across multiple day cells in the calendar table. So the best available option was to treat these as a series of individual all-day, one-day events.

This update — which is still considered experimental at this time — gets around the issue of rebuilding the templates by using CSS to change the appearance of all of the individual all-day events except the first: by hiding their text, removing the left-side border, and extending the element to the left by one pixel to cover the table cell border, the visual effect is the same as if it were actually spanning the cells.

But there’s still a problem: As the plugin previously handled sorting events within a day, another all-day or multi-day event could come in during the span of an existing multi-day event and disrupt this new visual flow. So this version makes two additional changes to daily event sorting:

First, it puts all multi-day events before all single-day all-day events. This ensures that an all-day event, that starts alphabetically before a multi-day event that’s already underway, won’t push that multi-day event down for the day.

Second, if there are multiple multi-day events happening at once, it sorts them by start date, achieving the same effect as above for single-day all-day events.

There is still one more scenario this doesn’t address, which is overlapping multi-day events where the second event both starts after the first event and ends after it. The second event will “jump” up into the space of the first event after the first event ends. Addressing this issue is much more complicated than the other scenarios, so we are still actively investigating the best approach.

As I noted above, this feature is still experimental, because I am hoping that users will try it out with varied, complicated calendar scenarios and submit feedback on how it is working. Once we iron out the situation above, as well as any other issues users identify, we’ll make this the default option (while still allowing you to turn it off, if you prefer the old way).

Speaking of feedback… the best way to deliver that would be by using the Pro Support Request Form… even if you’re not a user of ICS Calendar Pro.

Thanks!

—Scott

Category: New Features

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Recent Posts

  • ICS Calendar Pro 5.10.0 and ICS Calendar 11.5.9 updates April 24, 2025
  • Big improvements to ICS Events in versions 5.9.0 and 5.9.1 February 26, 2025
  • Happy Holidays from Room 34! December 8, 2024
  • Update to version 5.6.1.1 ASAP to resolve possible database performance issues introduced in 5.6.0 November 14, 2024
  • ICS Calendar Block is officially deprecated in version 5.6, will be removed in version 6.0 November 7, 2024

Related Links

  • Room 34 Creative Services
    Developer of ICS Calendar
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