I often get asked if EventList will be compatible with the new upcoming Joomla! 1.5. People try the SVN version or a nightly build and test installing EventList 0.8.4 on it. They see this fails and are afraid if EventList will be ready if Joomla! 1.5 will be released.

In the last weeks I’m working on two branches of EventList. One for Joomla! 1.0.X and one for Joomla! 1.5.

The last one is the version which contains all the new stuff. Sure, you will have to setup a complete new install (This requires Joomla! 1.5 anyway). If you can migrate your Events to the new installation depends on my future work and testing. In my opinion this would be a good time to implement new stuff which require massive database changes and most commonly break backwards compatibility.

But now read what the new version will offer you!

First of all I will write something about the changes behind the scenes:

The rewrite of EventList towards the new API of Joomla! 1.5 I used to cleanup the hole code. Unused parts , some optimizing and better commenting were the most important parts. But also the structure changes. Now the PHP parser has only to parse the needed parts of the code instead of all. I also added tags used by phpdocumentor, so you can easily have a deeper look how EventList works.

Also EventList is now completely XHTML compatible. Unfortunately the tables remained. If you think you can help me out and you are familiar with css and table less layout, don’t hesitate to contact me.

But now, whats the interesting changes in the Backend?

A lot of attention I spend to the look and feel of EventList. I think it is really important that components fits in the philosophy in UI of the CMS inside it runs.

So the settings are styled like the settings of Joomla. In the listings (Event listing etc.) you also will find these nice ordering functions at the top of the tables. In the edit screens EventList also uses the moo.fx sliders instead of the tabs to switch between the different additional settings or input fields.

Uploading images is now more intuitive. You select your file now in a popup window instead of leaving the edit screen and do all that at a completely different screen.

In the Backend I also added a help section. Here you get explained what the different Settings, screens etc. mean and what you can do with it.

I think you already noticed that I’m not a native English speaker. If you are, and think EventList would be worth a hour of your time, please read over the help and language files to correct them. Post in the forum or write me an email if you would like to do so.

One major change is a new screen named „EventList Home“. It looks like the control panel of Joomla. This screen gives you fast and easy access to the most important parts of EventList. You also find some statistics like the number of published Events or registered users.

At this screen you can access one important new feature of EventList. The update checker. I often get asked, please inform me if you release a new version. Otherwise I will forget to update. No, I will not inform you I always answered. Use your brain and check yourself for updates, here on schlu.net, the forge or at extension.joomla.org. To make this easier I implemented a simple update check. EventList connects to schlu.net (No data will be transmitted to schlu.net – it’s just a request), read in a xml file, and show you if you use the latest version or not.

What about the frontend of EventList?

When you look for the first time to the EventList you will notice first, that at the top some icons appear. These icons replaced the links to the archive / submission screens. If you like to keep the old text links you can change it back if you set this in the global configuration. If you want to change the icons with your own ones, just place them in your template folder. EventList will use them instead of the original ones.

Ok, that’s nice. But what about new features?

For a lot of persons the most important question.

EventList supports now Frontend editing of Events and Venues. Now you can set in the settings the minimal user rank to edit Events and Venues. Also you can set the creator of the Event or Venue as owner. This gives this user access to edit his created item even if he is only a user with a lower rank. This feature makes use of the new pop ups of Joomla, if you didn’t hear from that until now, have a deeper look at the screen shots.

But no great new feature without any issues. In the case of Frontend editing this means that I have to drop the possibility that unregistered users can add Events. I don’t think that this affects a lot of persons. I checked many sites using EventList and out of about 50 not one use this function. I seems that this isn’t a big loss.

The next often requested feature is to add Events with more than one day. This is needed often for Events like festivals, sports etc.

As you can see in the Frontend screenshot the output is currently not the optimal way to solve the display problem. If you have an idea, I would really appreciate your input.

In Joomla! 1.5 the core team added a new component named 'mailto'. The name says all. EventList use this component to let the visitors inform their friends about interesting Events.

The next addition are RSS feeds. EventList offers now your visitors to subscribe to this feed to be informed about the next 10 Events. Currently EventList supports only a feed of all Events. In the next Step RSS Feeds selected by category or Venue also will be supported.

That’s not a complete list of new things. These are only the most important ones.

Ok, I think that’s enough for now. This is the longest English text I wrote in the last 8 years. I hope you understood the most of it and found it useful. Sure, not all changes I could mention here. Also I fixed a lot of bugs and did minor improvements. So all the rest will up to you to discover if this version will be released. When? I don’t know. That depends on the release of Joomla! 1.5. Until then, do I add more features? Maybe!

Again, if you could help me out in the above mentioned thing (language corrections, table less) contact me please. Also I hope I can release a pre version of 0.9 together with the Joomla! 1.5 Beta to fix the most issues before the official release.

Please comment ideas, wishes and suggestions in the Forum. Thanks for reading this stuff.

Schlu