The next planned update is version 2.2, which I hope will include some sort of “I’m Attending” feature, a “pending” show status, and perhaps an overhaul of permissions in GigPress (basically mimicking WP’s roles and permissions). But time will tell!

I just committed version 2.1.9, which as usual fixes some bugs and tweaks a few things. I’m also happy to say that based on testing with the WordPress 3.0 Release Candidate, GigPress is good-to-go for 3.0.

Thanks as always for the support and kind words about GigPress. Stay classy.

• GigPress 2.1 requires WordPress 2.8 or newer, and is fully-compatible with WordPress 2.9
• The GigPress widget has been overhauled for the better (multiple instances, and some new options), but this means that existing widgets will need to be reset due to the changes
• Along with the widget changes comes changes to the gigpress_sidebar() function.  If you currently call this function directly (as opposed to using the widget), you’ll need to make a quick update your template.  Refer to the updated docs for details.
• There are a couple of variable changes for the sidebar-list-footer template regarding the display of the feed links and the link to the main shows page. If you’re using a customized version of that template, a quick look at the new default sidebar-list-footer.php will show you the way.

Be sure to review the docs for the new monthly/yearly archive menu and implement it on your site if it makes sense.  It’s been an oft-requested feature, and I think folks will find it very useful.

First, though, I want everyone to be aware that as of GigPress 2.1, GigPress will only be fully-compatible with deprecated versions of WordPress for 6 months after a major point release. This means that I’m discontinuing support for WordPress versions prior to 2.8 with GigPress 2.1, and with the imminent release of WordPress 2.9, I will only guarantee that updates will be compatible with WordPress 2.8 until mid-2010.

At this point WordPress is a very mature platform with an excellent auto-updating mechanism. There is no good reason to run outdated versions. The number one reason people cite — plugin incompatibility — is a sign of a larger problem. Any plugin that isn’t compatible by default — or cannot be brought up to speed with minor changes — is a plugin that is not fit to run, as chances are it’s not using official APIs. Maintaining compatibility with old versions of WordPress prevents me from embracing new features, and generally makes development a PITA.

OK, onwards. The two major updates in 2.1 are an overhauled widget and a new front-end date filter.

The new widget uses the excellent widget class introduced in WordPress 2.8, meaning you can now have multiple instances of the GigPress widget, all with discrete settings. I’ve also added the ability to filter the widget listing by artist, tour, or venue.

As part of the widget changes, the gigpress_sidebar() function got an overhaul as well, now behaving much like the gigpress_shows() function. This means changes to your templates if you’re calling the function directly — the docs will be updated when 2.1 is released with instructions.

The new date filter is a dynamically-created dropdown menu that lets visitors filter any list of shows created with the GigPress shortcode by year or by month. The menu can be created either by adding a new parameter to your existing shortcode (show_menu=yearly or show_menu=monthly), or by calling it directly via its own shortcode (or directly in your templates as a function).

I’ve also added both year and month parameters to the GigPress shortcode, so you can limit your initial display of shows to a particular date range. This means, for example, that if you have 3 years of past shows, you can write your shortcode with a year parameter of the current year (or perhaps a limit of n shows), and then include the date menu to allow filtering of past shows to display shows only from specific months or years. (When using the date menu, any limit parameter in your shortcode is ignored.)

I’d like to get some folks to install the 2.1 beta and put the new features through their paces before I release this into the wild — especially people who use GigPress with multiple artists, or who have a large database of shows. If you’re interested, please drop me a line and I’ll hook you up.

Some of the new features have already been covered in the previous post, but I’ll recap here and touch on some of the other additions as well.

I do strongly encourage you to read the updated documentation — it explains the new shortcode parameters, templating and other features in more detail. Please also note that GigPress 2.0 requires WordPress 2.6.5, and that due to the scale of the rewrite, this release only includes localizations for Bulgarian, Dutch, French, German, Norwegian, Russian, and Swedish. Hopefully more translations will come in soon.

New features

GigPress now supports multiple artists — perfect for record labels or booking agencies. If you’re using GigPress for a single artist or performer, don’t worry — the multi-artist feature won’t get in your way. If you only have a single artist in the database, GigPress won’t needlessly display your artist name.

Venues are now saved in the database — no more re-entering data for shows played at the local clubs or anywhere else. You can easily add new venues on-the-fly when adding a new show as well, and edit venue info at any time.

GigPress is now completely template-driven — customize some or all of GigPress’ output using modular templates for both the main shows display and the sidebar widget. From small language changes to complete rewrites of the HTML, it’s up to you. All of your changes are safe from plugin upgrades, so customize-away.

More calendar-iffic-ness — GigPress now includes both Google Calendar and iCal download links for each show, plus an iCalendar feed for all shows, each artist’s shows, and each tour’s shows. RSS feeds have also been added for each artist’s shows and each tour’s shows.

Import from CSV — import a history of past shows, or move shows between GigPress installations using the built-in CSV export. Artists, venues and tours will be matched-up and/or created during the import process, and duplicate shows will be skipped.

Some other changes of note:

• The age restrictions menu is now customizable — add any type of age restrictions you like to the “Age restrictions” dropdown.
• You can now control the title of automatically-created related posts using simple tokens which represent the artist, date, city and venue of the related show. Plus, you can choose to publish the related post on the day of the show (for those using a future-posts plugin.)
• You can now optionally display full country names instead of country codes.

As always, please review the changelog for the blow-by-blow.

A note about tours in GigPress 2.0

The behaviour of tours has changed somewhat in version 2.0. First, tours no longer have a display order — instead, they are dynamically grouped within the list of shows, with a heading, and then with a CSS class applied which makes them visually distinct from the other shows. Because of this, the “group by tour” option is gone, as tours are always grouped, but within chronological order.

So if you have 3 shows, then a tour of 5 shows, then a break with 2 one-off shows, then the tour resumes with 5 more shows, all of the dates will be in proper order, with two groups of shows for the tour, each with an inline heading, each visually distinct from the non-tour shows.

Those of you who have been using “tours” as “artists” pre-2.0 can automatically migrate all of your tours into artists by visiting a special URL on the new “manage artists” screen, like so:

http://yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=gigpress-artists&gpaction=import-tours

Also of interest

I’m now handling all support for GigPress through Get Satisfaction. This will hopefully help GigPress users learn from each other by searching the support history there, and subsequently cut down on support emails.

I’ve also setup a Twitter account for GigPress, so you have another avenue by which to get news of updates and pending features — or cool examples of GigPress in the wild — pushed your way.

And lastly, you’re reading this on the newly-designed GigPress website. Not really my usual design aesthetic for sure, but I thought this would be a good place to play with a slicker design style, and use some progressive-enhancement with CSS3 properties and transparency. I hope you like.

I welcome your feedback as always. (As well as your donations!)

UPDATE: I may have lied about the whole “no templating” thing. And it’s looking like this will actually be GigPress 2.0, not 1.5. That’s it — carry on!

So, what’s new in version 1.5? The big feature that I’ve been asked about (and promising to deliver) for a while is multiple bands. Labels and booking agencies will be happy to hear that multi-band is finished and ready to go for GigPress 1.5. On upgrade, all of the shows in your database will be assigned to your first artist, which will be created based on the contents of your “band name” setting. From there, add as many artists as you like, and choose them from a drop-down when adding new shows. The tours feature remains of course, and you can have multiple artists on the same tour (tours relate only to shows, not directly to artists).

With more data to manage for each show, I decided it was time for the upcoming shows administration to get overhauled. As you can see below, it’s now much easier to find specific shows, with a unified screen that gives the ability to filter based on date (past or upcoming), artist, tour, and venue. Plus, shows in the admin are now paginated (as are all other relevant screens in the GigPress admin).

Shows administration in GigPress 1.5

As you might have gleaned from the screenshot above, while re-engineering the plugin to add the new relationship for artists to shows, I decided to honour another oft-requested feature, which is a venues database. Apparently a lot of you folks play the same venues frequently, and are sick of re-entering it all the time (despite help from browsers’ intelligent form-filling). When you upgrade to GigPress 1.5, your new venues database will be automatically populated with all of the venues previously played.

This step and some other design tweaks have (I think) made the add a show screen much more user-friendly, easier to digest, and more efficient. Here’s a little QuickTime snippet of it in action:

So what else? Export to CSV has been updated and improved to comply with the new multi-band setup, and you can now import shows from a CSV file (a properly-formatted CSV file of course). I’ve done my best to ensure that you can import shows right over your existing database without fear of duplicating data, and after trying to match up the imported shows with existing artists, venues and tours, the import will create new artists, venues and tours if necessary. (I’m still working on the import process, it being the remaining 10% of the admin-side work to be done.)

From here, there’s a lot of front-end work to be done to incorporate the multi-artist aspect and figure out how to best present this new level of hierarchy. I also plan on expanding the capabilities of the [gigpress] shortcode, with the ability to control grouping, filter by artist, etc. The RSS feed is also getting the ability to filter by artist, tour, venue, or any combination thereof by using a simple query string in the feed URL. I’m also hoping to add pagination to the front-end (even if I’m not entirely sure how yet, haha).

What’s not going to be in GigPress 1.5? Templating. Any sort of templating. Sorry, I really wanted to, and spent a lot of time thinking about it, but there are just too many conditionals involved, and I’m not about to write my own template parsing engine. For now, you’re stuck with the markup I write and the classes I add.

After I get the front-end stuff finished, I have to send out updated language files to all of the kind people who’ve translated GigPress into 15 different languages. So, I can’t promise when you’ll see it in your plugin update notifications, but hopefully sometime in September.

One last note – GigPress 1.5 will only be compatible with WordPress 2.6.5 and higher, so if you’re running an older (and consequently insecure!) version of WordPress, and depend on GigPress for your site, consider this your call to upgrade.

That’s it for now. Thanks for all the kind words and support for the plugin. If you’re as excited as I am about version 1.5, maybe consider making a donation to the cause?

I’m stupidly busy right now, and I don’t see it letting up anytime soon, so major updates (like, uh, multi-band and pagination support) may be a little ways off, sorry to say. I am a terrible person, I know.

I made a number of architectural changes to GigPress in version 1.4, and one that apparently didn’t get as thorough a review as it should have was the upgrade function that checks to see if anything needs to be added to GigPress’ database tables.  Hence the typo.  Hence the piss-poor performance that some of you have seen.  (Why this only affected some hosts and not others I don’t fully understand … perhaps some sort of SQL caching at work?) 

So please, everyone, upgrade to version 1.4.4 and let me know if it resolves your performance problems (well, the ones related to GigPress that is – if you want help with your other, more personal performance problems, that costs extra). I’m still looking for someone who might review how GigPress builds its queries to see if we can bring the number of queries down however.

This version also adds a couple of new small features and a couple of new translations — see the release notes for details.

First of all, I’d like to apologize to all of the users who’ve come to rely on GigPress to manage shows on their (or their clients’) sites, only to have this issue rear its head with an upgrade. I know that sucks.

I’ve collected some feedback that may help me isolate this problem, and am working on it between my insane client workload. I really want to resolve this as soon as possible, and your patience is appreciated. Although GigPress is my free contribution to the WordPress community, that doesn’t give me license to abdicate my responsibility to its users.

Second, I’d like to put a call out to other developers and coders who may be able to help me optimize GigPress further. Although I don’t think MySQL queries are the problem in this instance (as I didn’t really add any new queries), I’m well aware that GigPress’ queries could be greatly optimized by someone who had a greater depth of experience in the art of query-crafting than I. Anyone who has a little bit of time and is interested in making GigPress better, please drop me a line.

First off, with WordPress 2.7 scheduled to be released tomorrow, I’ve added some compatibility and styling fixes for the yet-again-redesigned new version, so if you’re planning on upgrading to 2.7, upgrading GigPress is a good idea.

Many people have asked for the ability to do things like include flyers, set lists, audio, and other info in their show listings. I’ve been very hesitant to add much more data to each show, as it could get pretty unwieldily pretty fast (though I have added fields for venue and box office phone numbers in this version). All of these additional bits of info are really best suited to a regular post – one where you have WP’s built-in media uploader, unlimited room, and access to other plugins’ features as well. So, I decided to enhance the “related post” feature so that it’s a viable solution to this problem.

New features which make using related posts easier and more robust include:

• GigPress can now automatically create a new post for each show you enter – universally, or on a case-by-case basis
• You can optionally exclude the category you use for your related posts from other WordPress post listings
• You can also now hyperlink both the Date and the City fields in your upcoming/past shows listing to each show’s related post
• Each related post’s entry can now display all of your show’s data before or after its post content

Some other notable features: shows can be marked CANCELLED or SOLD OUT; you can display the shows from a single tour using a new shortcode parameter (see the docs for more info); you can now export your shows to a tab-separated CSV file right from within the admin; and more phrases are now customizable from the Settings page. As always, for a full list of changes, see the version history.

One note about compatibility: I’ve dropped support for WordPres 2.2.3 in this release (does anyone still use that dinosaur?), and I plan on dropping support for WordPress 2.3.3 in version 1.5 (which will hopefully bring in true mutli-band support.)

Thanks for the patience – hope you all enjoy the new features.