What was until now?
The Events module has a long history, its origin dates years back, far before the current Events team started to work on the module. And this history shows itself in the current (5.0.3) version: a solution with 4 projects (4 DLL's) with one of them in C#, not the favourite language of choice for standard DNN modules (though we, at XCESS do use that as our standard development language for DNN modules). This C# project of Events has been a concern to the team for some time, this part of the module was not touched by any of the current team members, and has remained unaltered for a number of years.
Also, source code has grown over time. The number of options (settings) of the module is large, the Events module is powerful and can be modified in a large number of ways. But these Events settings are part of the standard DNN module settings, leading to an unwanted combination of basic DNN module settings and Events module configuration.
Also the Visual Studio solution structure itself has grown to a non-standard VS solution implementation of a DNN module. Again not the fault specifically of anybody who worked on the Events module over the years, just the result of “evolution” and growth.
Still: the current Events 5.0.3 proved to be stable and useful to a lot of people: almost 6.000 downloads from CodePlex cannot be wrong. The Events module is a popular module for a lot of people.
What will be?
For the upcoming Events version, things will change drastically.
We decided that the next version of Events (version 5.1.0) will be a DNN 5.2 and up version only. The decision to leave DNN 4.x behind had to be made at some time anyhow and the time of Events team members (all volunteers) is limited: better spend our time on the future things.
Team member Roger Selwyn has done a marvellous job in refactoring the internals of the Events settings, streamlining, centralizing and hardening it. He also altered the module configuration items from the standard settings DNN section into a separate action menu item with its own security settings, thus separating the standard DNN module settings from the Events module settings. This will enable non admins to manage the configuration of an Events module. He worked on a lot of issues and enhancements in the past months as well: expect more then 60 issues covered in the next release (Boy, everybody should be very happy that Roger is on the Events team!).
My XCESS colleague Tim van Leeuwen got time from me to spend a couple of days (between our normal paid business activities) to tackle the C# project and restructure the Events solution. The result: 2 of the 4 projects gone, including the ‘old’ C# project. He created with jQuery the replacement of a colour picker in the categories and removed a lot of overhead: again about 6 ‘legacy’ source files gone. And now the VS solution of Events is organised in a more normal DNN way.
Tim is still working on an intelligent generic DNN MS Build script, enabling creation of PA packages with a lot things done automagically, including the generation of .dnn manifest (stay tuned for info on this).
When will it be?
The work is not finished, but we are nearly there, (beta) testing can almost start. If you want to see how far we are, you can also have a look into the source tab of the Events CodePlex project, click on this link. All changes that are made by the Events team are directly available to you as well. I will post a blog and/or create an Events forum thread when there is a new version available.
Stay tuned, a new happy Event is in the works!