Much of our recent development attention has been on translations, bug fixes, and updates to ICS Calendar Pro, but today I have two brand new features to announce in the free ICS Calendar plugin, version 8.7.0.
First, there’s compact="true", which you can add to your shortcode to apply a more “compact” view to your calendar.
This is currently an experimental feature, which means its exact properties will continue to evolve over the next several updates as user feedback comes in. Specifically at the moment, while it applies an overall text size reduction across all views, it is mainly targeted at the list view, where it changes the layout considerably. In addition to reducing the size of the month and date headers, it places event times inline with their titles. While this does work best in slightly wider layouts — meaning it may not be ideal for narrow sidebars — it creates a much more compact overall view than the default stacked times and titles. For best results, if you have event descriptions displaying, I recommend using it in conjunction with toggle="true", so the descriptions for events are hidden until the user clicks on their titles.
The second new feature also contributes to a more compact look, but works independently of the compact option. Add nomonthheaders="true" to your shortcode to do… well, pretty much what it says. Month headers will not be included in the HTML output of the page. This also helps reduce the size of list view considerably, and removes the month headers at the top of month view as well, which is technically redundant, if you’re not using monthnav or if you have it set to one of the options that includes a month dropdown menu.
This version also includes a few other minor tweaks mentioned in the changelog. As always, feedback on the free version is welcomed in the WordPress Support Forums.
—Scott