Divi Events Calendar Plugin Feature Update 2.1

New Events Feed Module Features

Responsive Layout Structure

In the past we had a few different layouts like Image Left, Details Right, Image Top, Details Bottom. But now with 2.1, you have three main choices:

• Grid
• List
• Cover

Grid is like the blog, or like Image Top, Details Bottom. List is like the old system, but with a lot more options. You can choose from the List Type which is any combination of the new Callout Box, image, details, button in whichever order you prefer. The Cover layout has the featured image in the background. These also have full responsive settings for choosing the number of columns per device. Take a minute to check the new demo for these layouts…AWESOME, right? (get a glimpse below)

Default Styles

This is more for new customers, but now the modules are beautiful right from the start, even if you don’t adjust any design settings. The modules have hundreds of settings for YOU to style as you want, but we thought they deserved to give a great first impression too!

Callout Box

You can see in the demo and screenshots above that somethign new is added! We call this a Callout Box, and you can turn it on or off. You can turn on or off the date, month, year, and day of the week. In the screenshots you can see we have the date bigger and the month set as default, but you can change that and style everything!

Details

We wrapped all of the details like date, time, location, website etc. into a new div that we simply call “Details” and this includes design settings like background, spacing, border, shadows, etc.

Events Order Setting

This does what it sounds like, you can now choose  Ascending or Descending order for events.

Events Status

This name is the best we could do. Basically it is a dropdown to choose future or past events.

No Results Message

In the past if there were no events that match your feed or query, it would say some generic no results message. Now you can write your own custom text, and you can style that message with design settings!

Recurring Events Support

If you are using The Events Calendar Pro, you can now choose to show or hide recurring events in the feed! This was quite a popular request.

Featured Events Support

The Events Calendar has an option to mark an event as featured. So now you can choose to show a feed of just the featured events if you want.

Pagination

We added a third pagination option! You can now choose Numeric, which is like how it works with wp-pagenavi with all the numbers along the bottom to quickly jump next, previous, or to a certain number. This new settings includes design settings. We also added a great new setting to choose the number of events that load each click when using clicking the Load More button.

Labels AND Icons

We added the option for labels or icons before. Now we have the option for both. We liked it a lot and even set it as default. We also added a new option to stack the labels and/or icons on their own line above the event data.

Dynamic Date and Time Range Separators

This is oddly a much requested feature. Go figure. But people wanted to change the – or @ sybols, and now you can. Whatever you enter in The Events CAlendar dispaly settings will show in the module.

Category CSS Selectors

At a glance this sounds odd. But wait until you see what it does. You can now style your category tags with CSS. We’ll try to make a tutorial soon about this.

Support For HTML In Event Excerpts

Another much requested feature, you can now do whatever you think you need to do with html in the excerpts.

Visit the Events Feed module documentation.

New Events Calendar Module Features

Views

The Events Calendar is no longer just a calendar. You now have the option to show or hide other views for viewing your events:

• Calendar
• Week
• Lay
• List

You can choose which views to show as options ot your visitors, and you choose a view as default. The buttons include full design settings.

Default Styles

This is more for new customers, but now the modules are beautiful right from the start, even if you don’t adjust any design settings. The modules have hundreds of settings for YOU to style as you want, but we thought they deserved to give a great first impression too! Looks nice, right? We also major improved the tooltip!

Recurring Events Support

If you are using The Events Calendar Pro, you can now choose to show or hide recurring events in the calendar!

Featured Events Support

The Events Calendar has an option to mark an event as featured. So now you can choose to show just the featured events on the calendar if you want.

Event Order Per Day

You can now choose the criteria that is used to sort events that happen on the same day. So for example you might want to sort them by time of day, or by title, or by duration.

Dynamic Events

Until now you could only use the Events Feed module in dynamic Theme Builder templates such as those for category pages. Now we have added dynamic content support to the calendar module!

Support For Dynamic Date And Time Range Separators

Just like in the Events Feed, any date or time separator that you change in The Events Calendar will update in the calendar tooltip details.

First Day Of The Week In The Calendar

I never realized this was a thing! But we had requests to change the day of the week the calendar starts on, so we did! This is based on which day you choose in the WordPress General settings.

Tooltip Date And Time Format

We updated the tooltip details date and time format to match what we already have established in the Events Feed module.

Design Settings

There are just a lot of new design settings that fill in al the little gaps and make this module very mature. You can check the changelog for them all, but this includes random things like current and past days, tooltip settings, hover settings, navigation button design settings, etc. 

View the Events Calendar module documentation.

New Events Page Module features

Past Events

We added a nifty new CSS class .ecs-is_past_event to the module that allows you to add your own custom CSS to past events (this is not available in The Events Calendar, only when using our module). We also now have full design settings for the message that says this event has passed.

Labels AND Icons

We added the option for labels or icons before. Now we have the option for both. We also added a new option to stack the labels and/or icons on their own line above the event data.

Dynamically Show Or Hide Items

We realized that if you set up the Events Page module in a template and turn on items such as organizers or the map or anything else, that sometimes events do not all have all the data.

Support For HTML In Event Description

This has been the most confusing setting ever! We never intended the description to be fully featured. It was just supposed to show simple descriptions, and you should be using the Post Content module for more. But now at least it will show al html formatting and line breaks. But please consider using the Divi Post Content module.  

Add To Calendar Buttons And Links

This is a change to how it worked before. We’re not satisfied to stop with what The Events Calendar gives, we are going beyond that more and more.

We changed the way the add to calendar buttons work. Instead of the old Google Calendar and iCal Export buttons, we now have one main button called Add To Calendar. When that is clicked, three more options can appear as links:

• Google Calendar
• Apple Calendar
• Outlook Calendar

If you were using the old method, this will need to be adjusted for the new and improved method. We truly believe this will be a much better user experience!

View the Events Page module documentation.

New Events Ticket Module

A lot of people asked us how to use the free Event Tickets addon from The Events Calendar with Divi. It actually does not work with the Divi Theme Builder templates and there is no shortcode in their free version, so anyone who wanted to show tickets or RSVP on the single event pages, were stuck. Until now! We made this module for you to display the tickets and RSVP sections on your event pages. Remember, all functionality is handled by their addon, and this module’s purpose is to display that data. You will need to refer to their plugin documentation for setup of the actual Event Tickets plugin. At this time we do not have any settings. It only functions, and for not that bonus is all we can promise.

View the Events Page module documentation.

General Improvements

Performance

We have majorly improved performance by moving all of the scripts that are required to run the modules to a content delivery network which is made exclusively for this. So for example, now the code that controls the calendar display, or the pagination, or the carousel, is being loaded very quickly. This reduced the file size of the plugin by about 37% which is crazy considering that we added so many new features also. Besides this, we have also fixed several other issues that only happened under specific circumstances, but when they did happen, it was slow. Now that will not happen anymore.

Plugin Support 

Their is a free extension by The Events Calendar that makes the title of the events automatically link to the external website URL instead of the normal single event page. We added support for this, so if you install that plugin and click on events in our modules, you will go to the website that is entered in the event page details.

Another 3rd party plugin that is popular is called The Events Calendar Shortcode & Block. The problem that our plugins were both fighting over the same files, and it caused a fatal error. Now fun obviously, so we added support for having them both installed.