Several enhancements have recently been made to Zap Calendar.  This includes an enhancement to the Google Maps plugin, changes to the iCal Subscribe plugin and a new plugin for Zap Calendar Pro users.

Google Maps Plugin Enhancement

The 3.1 beta version of the Google Maps plugin has been enhanced to include bulk geocoding of locations.  Bulk geocoding is when the addressess of several event locations are converted to latitude/longitude coordinates.  This can happen when multiple events are imported into Zap Calendar, where locations are included but not their latitude and longitude coordinates.  Bulk geocoding can also happen when the iCal Subscribe plugin is enabled after events have already been added to the calendar.  Google has limits on bulk geocoding.  See the Google Maps plugin documentation to read about how to set up your account to handle this.

Changes to ICal Subscribe Plugin

Changes were recently made to the iCal Subscribe plugin to allow it to work properly with the new ACL feature with Zap Calendar 3.0. Specifically, cron jobs would not update events because the Joomla security did not allow updates from a public user.  To allow the cron job to update events, the allow IP for cron jobs field has been moved from the plugin to the Zap Calendar global settings screen. Allowed IP's are now required to be entered in component's global settings.  Please update both the component and ical subscribe plugin in order for this to properly work. Moving this field to the component will also allow future plugins that may also update events via a cron job to also work properly.  Note: users running Joomla 1.5 will also need to enter the allowed IP  in the component, even though the ACL issue does not apply in this Joomla version.

New Plugin for Zap Calendar Pro Users

The Xmap plugin allows Zap Calendar events to be published in both front-end site maps and XML site maps generated by the Xmap component.  You can specify to include all events or a list of future events, for example, the next 30 or 90 days.  This plugin is now available to Zap Calendar Pro users.