It’s been a long time since I’ve updated Google Calendar Events. I’ve had very little time to work on the plugin lately, due to other projects that have had to take precedence.
A couple of months back, I did begin a major rewrite of the plugin, with all sorts of snazzy improvements, but it’s a long way off release worthy, or even beta worthy, at present. I’ll continue to work on it when I can, but I thought I’d better fix a couple of minor (yet annoying) bugs in the current version for the time being.
The fixes in 0.7.2 are as follows:
- There was an issue with the “More details” Google Calendar page link. The URL wasn’t constructed correctly, which resulted in the event details defaulting to the UTC timezone. This only affected the simple display options (not the event display builder), but is fixed now.
- Previously, setting the cache duration to 0 would be ignored, causing caching to still occur. Setting this to 0 should now work correctly.
- With
FORCE_SSL_ADMINenabled, the plugin’s Ajax requests would fail in most cases, preventing month navigation. This shouldn’t be the case any longer.
Also, an issue brought up in the WordPress core Trac recently made me realise I’d been using the wrong method (an incorrect hook) for enqueuing the plugin CSS and JavaScript, which could potentially cause an issue with the newly released 3.3 version of WordPress. I don’t think the issue would have affected Google Calendar Events, as I had is_admin() checks in place, but better to be safe (and correct) than sorry!
Before updating, remember that if you’ve made any changes to the main plugin stylesheet (google-calendar-events/css/gce-style.css), you should take a backup first, as changes will be overwritten during the update. If you’ve used the “Custom stylsheet URL” method instead, you shouldn’t need to worry about this!
You can download the update from the plugin directory, or simply update from your WordPress admin.
Feedback, bug reports and feature requests are always welcome. You can add a comment below (or on the plugin homepage), or send me an email.
Thanks!
Hi Ross,
I love your plugin. It’s clean and completely dependable. I crave colour-coded categories, subscription options, images and location maps so I regularly try out other event plugins. I keep coming back to yours because you deliver what you promise even if it’s not everything I want. Please consider adding colour-coded categories, subscription options, images and location maps to your new version. I’ve paid for plugins before and I’ll do it again, but I haven’t found an event/calendar plugin that I am willing to pay for.
-Diana
Hi Diana,
These are all great suggestions, and I’ll certainly look into adding them to a future release of the plugin. Google has recently updated the Calendar API to a new version, which may make some of these things easier to implement (definitely the colour-coding, at least) too.
Many thanks for your feedback!
Ross.
I don’t want to point fingers but there is a WP plugin that promises everything I want: colour-coded categories, subscription options, images, location maps, and the Google calendar feed but I could never get to be reliable for more than 24hours.
-Diana
Instead of having to write out the custom style URL, it’d be nice for the plug-in to look for gce-style.css in the theme folder, and override the default style sheet if it finds it. Other plug-ins use that method and it’s very useful for theme development (since the calendar style sheet usually matches the theme).
Eric
Eric,
That’s a great idea, I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks!
Ross.
Heej Ross,
When i add the calendar to a page ([google-calendar-events id="1" type="ajax" title="Groepen" max="0"] the calendar won’t load the next month. It keeps loading. Is there a fix for this problem?
Hi Bart,
This could be caused by several different things. Could you let me know the URL of your site, so I can take a look?
Ross.
Thanks Ross. This is the URL: http://www.ccpl.nl/v2/?page_id=513
Hi Bart,
This is because the request that is made when clicking the next month link is being sent from http://www.ccpl.nl to http://ccpl.nl. The difference in URL is enough for the request to be considered “cross-site scripting”, which is blocked for security reasons.
Do you have the “WordPress Address (URL)” and “Site Address (URL)” settings (in Settings > General) set differently?
Ross.
Yes they are different. How can i change this for the best? I know when i change te wrong url the site will not work.
Bart
Bart,
I think if you ensure they’re both using
www, it should work ok. However, not being familiar with your website and how it is set up, I’m not 100% sure!Ross.
First, really great plugin, thank you! One feature request would be for the event day in the grid to also be a link, so that it’s clickable on mobile devices that have touch screens.
Hi CS,
Improving the functionality for mobile devices is something that is definitely on my to-do list!
Thanks for the feedback,
Ross.
Really really nice plugin. Is there a possibilty to display only the _latest_ event in a list?
I tried [google-calendar-events type="list" title="Events on" max="1"] but that doesn’t work.
e.g.
01.01.2012 – Event 1
10.01.2012 – Event 2
20.01.2012 – Event 3
assumed today is 05.01.2012 I want the list to display only Event 2, because it’s the next latest.
Hi Mr. B,
You’ll probably need to adjust the “Retrieve events from” option in the plugin feed settings. If you set it to “Now” (or perhaps “00:00 today”, whichever is more appropriate), and then use the shortcode parameters you describe above, only the next event should be displayed.
Ross.
Hi Ross,
First let me say I really like your plugin – it is by far the best plugin for use with a Google Calendar that I’ve found. Thank you!!
(If you’ve already addressed this elsewhere, please point me in the right direction. I tried to read through all the posts and comments to see if there was a fix for this but I may have missed it.)
I’m having trouble with one of my clients’ sites (http://hollywoodtheatre.org/). There is a widget in the right sidebar that pulls in a listing of today’s events. The events are all day in Google Calendar. The settings are all set to Pacific time zone (in WordPress, Google Calendar, and the plugin), yet everyday at 4pm (00:00 GMT) it thinks it’s the next day.
I have “Retrieve events from” set to 00:00 Today with a 0 offset and “Retrieve events until” set to 00:00 Today with a 86400 offset. I’ve tried shortening the offset with the same result. (I’ve tried a lot of different settings with the same result.) After 4pm, if I set the offsets to -28801 and 0 it pulls in the current day just fine, but it thinks it’s the previous day and when I look in the morning, obviously, it’s still showing the previous day.
Apparently they had this working a few version ago (I wish I knew which one). They had upgraded, ran into this problem, and their previous web person reverted to the previous version. I think there must be a fix for this that allows them to use the current version; I’m just missing it. Do you have any ideas?
Thanks,
TG
Hi TG,
I think I might have a potential fix for this. I’ll update the development version of the plugin sometime today / tomorrow with the changes. I’ll let you know when I’ve made the update.
Ross.
Awesome! I really appreciate your help!
Hi again TG,
I’ve just updated the development version. If you could try it out and provide any feedback as to whether it does / doesn’t work, that would be great!
Thanks,
Ross.
It is working!
I’m going to keep an eye on it for 24 hours just to make sure but yay! Thank you!
It still looks great this morning. Thanks again!
Great!
Thanks for letting me know.
Ross.
hi Ross,
I have what I hope to be a simple question:
on the Events page of my site I have implemented the GRID version of your calendar.
the events on this calendar come from two different feeds: feed 1 are weekly events, feed 3 are special events, embedded as follows:
[google-calendar-events id="3, 1" type="ajax" title="Events on"]
is there a way to have the dates in this grid version of the calendar show up as RED for feed #3 and in BLACK (as now is the default) for feed #1 ???
thanks,
Eric.
Hi Eric,
By “dates”, do you mean the number displayed in each grid cell, or the event date itself (within the tooltip)?
Ross.
Hi, Ross. I really love this plugin. Tanx fot sharing with us. I wold like to translate a few words to my native language (portuguese). Exemple:
Starts:…
Ends:…
Location:
More details
I can change this in plugin code?
Tanx
Hi Renner,
You don’t need to alter any of the plugin code to change these strings. They can be adjusted in the plugin feed settings, under “Display Options”.
Ross.
Perfect. Tanx a lot, Ross. God bless you!
Ross,
Congratulations! This is the only google calendar plugin that even comes close to doing what I want. There are two additions that would make it perfect for my purpose:
1. an unformated, non-list option where the events show up within plain text – no list bullets, no css, nothing. Not even new lines unless I put them in the event display builder. That way I could put the data in tables like this:
my header…[google-calendar-events id="2" type="unformated"]
2. This is way less important, but the conditional shortcode [if-even]…[/if-even] and/or [if-odd]…[/if-odd] would allow me to add custom html to every other event that shows up.
If there is any other workaround to get the data in tables, that would be fine, too. This is a GREAT plugin.
Rats. You would have to view that comment in html to read the parts of that comment that were within < and > symbols. I meant to write this:
<table id=”my custom class”>
lt;tr><th>my header</th>
…</tr>
[google-calendar-events id="2" type="unformated"]
</table>
Hi Peter,
An “unformatted” option is something I could certainly look into adding for a future release, but using some CSS it wouldn’t be too difficult to make the current list output look like a table.
If you’re looking to style odd / even events differently, you could try the nth-child CSS pseudo-selector, but that might not be ideal if compatibility with older browsers is important to you.
Ross.
Thanks so much!