As we move into a new year we are sharing updates about what we are working on. There are new goodies you can expect from Sugar Calendar in the coming months and today I want to share a preview of one of the most important feature sets that we’ve been working on extensively for the past months.

Event management by itself can be complicated, as there are so many different variables to consider. The complexity level increases exponentially when event recurrence is brought in. Our premium version of Sugar Calendar includes support for simple recurring events out of the box. The options for how the events are configured look like this:

Screenshot of user interface
Screenshot of user interface

This is a basic recurring event feature set that works great if all you need to do is set up events that occur every day, week, month, or year. But what if you need a more complicated setup?

  • Events that recur on the 2nd Monday of each month?
  • Or the last day of every week?
  • Or perhaps the first or last day of every year?

Those options are significantly more complicated, both in terms of the interface required to configure them, and in the behind-the-scenes logic for making them work.

These are exactly the type of complicated recurring events you will be able to build when our Advanced Recurring Events add-on is completed in the coming weeks!

We aren’t quite finished, so these screenshots are subject to change, but the images below show a preview of the options we’ve built into the add-on.

  • Screenshot of user interface
  • Screenshot of user interface
  • Screenshot of user interface
  • Screenshot of user interface
  • Screenshot of user interface
  • Screenshot of user interface

There are four stand-out features the add-on will enable:

  1. Events that recur on specific days
  2. Events that recur every X period
  3. Events that recur X times
  4. Date/Time exceptions for when event recurrences are skipped

In creating this add-on, we surveyed and researched every single readily available open source option, and discovered that nothing out there met our needs, nor the high expectations of our thousands of customers and users. Advanced Recurring is by far our most requested feature, and we are taking immense care to invent something that we know will serve your needs exceptionally well.

Under the hood powering all of this is an extensible API that fits comfortably in the middle of the iCalendar specification and WordPress, allowing for quick & easy database queries and super-fast performance.

Event attributes are stored in their own database table, with their own intelligent objects that understand how to translate themselves into all of the different formats they will commonly be accessed by, while also allowing us to have room to grow into future formats as new ones emerge.

We still have work to do before the add-on is finished but we are getting very close. If this add-on or others interest you, be sure to sign up for our email list from the bottom of our home page to be notified when the Advanced Recurring add-on is released!