Hey @nadworks — it’s really great that you shared this feedback. While I’m sorry to hear the calendar failed to meet your expectations, I (and by extension, everyone here on the team) appreciate you giving it a try.
I’m definitely disappointed that a chief concern was needing to use different extensions and add-ons for more functionality or premium features. You’d be amazed how many “reasonable extra options” there are when it comes to managing a calendar of events. There are plenty more ideas for settings that we see (and really like) and have found that offering free extensions is both a great way and popular way to make those available — the same sort of framework and model championed by others, like WooCommerce. It allows us to keep the core calendar easy to maintain for publishers and developers alike, at the same time as preventing an overload of settings. That’s not to say that adding one setting to open links in another tab will tip the scales, but rather the collective whole of it and many other possibilities with it.
And while I totally hear and respect your position on virtual events and how we charge for that extra feature, I do want to push back on it. We did indeed (and still do) offer free extensions that will pull together most of that functionality for you in our Extensions Library. Those are things we put together immediately following the moment that we saw live events start to move online and wanted to make sure anyone running The Events Calendar could make that move. We even made our email marketing service, Promoter, free for three months to help folks communicate those changes with attendees and guests. So when you say something like this:
[…] and you have no shame in making the ability to promote these “virtual events” a premium feature.
…that seems misguided at best and disingenuous at worst seeing as we’ve spent the bulk of the year helping make the transition from live to virtual as seamless as possible. And now that we’ve bundled that work together into a single premium add-on that’s not only more robust but has invested thousands of team hours to create, I think a steeply discounted $35 price tag for a one-stop solution to virtual events is reasonable on top of the rest of what we’re already making available.
It’s absolutely cool if you disagree, but I think it’s important to at least know and see where we’re coming from on this.
With that, I really am grateful you shared your thoughts with us. We’re aware of them as a team and will certainly keep them in mind as we continue working on making the best event management suite for WordPress that we can.
Geoff
