Details, as always, can be found in the release notes on the download page.

I wish I had more time to work on GigPress these days, but it’s been a crazy busy period, and it looks to be getting only crazier for me in the coming months. I wish I could make quicker progress on new features and the like, but my client work has to come first naturally.

One idea I’ve been struggling with is how best to deal with pagination, both in the admin and on the display pages. The tour grouping makes it an interesting problem. If you have some bright ideas for how it might best be handled and want to discuss, drop me a line.

Thanks to all the folks who’ve sent kind words (and kind donations) my way thus far - it’s much appreciated!

This small update also fixes a bug that prevented the “opens in a new window” text that makes up the title attribute on certain links from being translated into local languages.

UPDATE: Polish DJ Equalibrium just sent in a Polish translation, so I’ve added it into the 1.3.1 download as well.

Speedier data entry

On the admin side, there’s now a “Copy” link in the “Actions” column on the “Upcoming shows” and “Past shows” screens. This link loads up all of the data for that particular show into a new entry on the “Add a show” screen, essentially “copying” that show into a new one. This is a handy feature to speed data entry when posting shows with very similar details.

Also - the show date, show time, show country, and “part of a tour” fields are now all “sticky.” This means that each time you enter a show, you’re in fact setting a new default value for each of these fields, so that the next time you go to enter a show, these values will be pre-filled.

(Props to Zain for these two ideas!)

New options

New options include whether or not to segment the main show list into tours and individual shows (previously the list was always segmented), and if segmented, whether to place the indivudal show before or after the tours. Multiple tours are now displayed not in the order they were entered, but by a custom order, which you can change on the “Tours” screen. Also, all links to Google Maps, venue, and ticket-buy URLs can be optionally opened in a new window.

Safety first

Another feature I’m happy about is an “Undo” option available immediately after deleting a show or tour. After each deletion, just click the “Undo” link next to the conformation message, and your show(s) and/or tour will be restored. This is a feature WordPress should probably have implemented for all posts and pages. (Inspiration taken from this article on A List Apart.)

Stylin’

It’s also now easier to apply custom styles to the GigPress display. Simply drop a copy of the gigpress.css file (located in the main gigpress plugin directory) into your current theme’s directory, and edit-away. GigPress will load the default style sheet first, and then your custom style sheet, so any changes you make will override the defaults.

Lastly, I’ve further tweaked the design to better match the design conventions of both WP 2.3 and WP 2.5. Despite some initial misgivings, the new WordPress admin design is growing on me in all its subtlety.

I hope everyone finds the new update useful. Link up your sites below … and of course, you can always make a donation if you’re feelin’ it.

I should also note that so far I haven’t encountered any issues using GigPress with the forthcoming WordPress 2.5, so there should be no worries about upgrading in that respect. I’ve also adjusted the styling in the admin area slightly to be more unified with the new (and unfortunately not so fantastic) admin theme that will debut in WP 2.5.

Besides some bug fixes, I’ve added the choice to not set a time for each show on an individual basis. Leaving the “time” field at N/A will hide said field when displaying your shows. I also added a new option to set your default country so you don’t have to choose it from the drop-down each time you enter a new show.

Many thinks to Luigi, Guido and András for the translations, and to everyone who’s reported bugs or sent in a beverage donation.

Some people have been having problems installing and using GigPress on certain configurations of MySQL 5 running on Windows servers. This update introduces a couple of syntax changes in the SQL that should help with this (though I’m sure more odd errors with these certain configurations will pop up).

Multiple-day shows - several people asked for this. You now get the option to check a box indicating a show is set to span several days, and then enter an “end date” for it. It will show up in your display as Start Date - End Date. The database query now looks at the end date when seeing if a show is current or not, so if you don’t check the multi-day box, the end date is set to be the same as the start date.

(If you’re upgrading, when you activate the new version, it will automatically find all the shows in your database and set their end dates to match their start dates. Or, it should anyway. If all of a sudden you have no upcoming shows, but have shows dated in the future showing up on your “Past shows” page, let me know and I can help you fix this.)

Show time field - another popular request - shows now have times! (There is an odd bug I cannot presently figure out where if a show’s time is set to 9:00 AM or 12:00 AM, when you edit that show, the edit form will load it up with those times transposed.)

Those are the big ones - for a complete run-down, see the release notes.

The 1.2.1 bump is due to an incompatibility I was alerted to last night where the version of the jQuery library I was loading was interfering with widget management in the WordPress admin. This is now fixed with 1.2.1. (Thanks Jake!)

GigPress is also now in the WordPress plugins repository, so if you’re using WordPress 2.3 or later (as you should be!), you’ll be automatically notified when an update is available.

As always, I’d love to see who’s using GigPress and where - leave a link in the comments if you care to.

So what are these new features? The main one is RSS - GigPress now generates an RSS feed for all of your upcoming shows, and optionally includes a link to it and the end of your upcoming shows table, the end of your sidebar listing, and in the head portion of your page. Your feed will be located at http://yoursitename.com/?feed=gigpress. (Here’s the RSS feed from the example shows here on gigpress.com.)

Second is the option to break up your sidebar listing into tours. If enabled (either via the Widget options if using the GigPress widget, or manually by passing a second argument to the function), each tour will display in a list item, and have an unordered list of it’s shows nested within it.

Hope everyone finds the new features useful. GigPress has been download just over 400 times since debuting a couple of weeks ago. If you’re using GigPress on your site, maybe leave a link in the comments so I can check it out.