Today, Friday December 17th from 9am to 3pm (Pacific time), we're updating AddEvent.com as well as our backend which now will live on "app.addevent.com".

During the maintainance window: 

• If you enter any event information in the Dashboard, make sure you save a local copy in case you are "kicked out" of a session.
• You might need to sign in again as the backend now is accessible in a new location (app.addevent.com).

The updates we are doing today are massive (new infrastructure) and have been tested extensively for the past 14 days.

When entering a real "live" environment things might go wrong temporarily. In case anything happens, we're on it - and will continue testing and correcting.  

In case you stumble upon anything that's wrong, please let us know.

Michael

[email protected]

We're excited to announce that we've been working with Mailchimp as part of the beta program for their new App Marketplace to build and launch an AddEvent Calendar Links app. This new app will let you add a content block containing add-to-calendar links for your events or subscription calendars directly to your emails without ever leaving the Mailchimp email builder.

We're thrilled to be partnering with Mailchimp as part of their Marketplace launch, and we think this app will provide tons of value for our users by making it easier than ever to share your events and calendars in your email campaigns.

This new functionality is being offered to users on all of our plans, including the free Hobby plan!

• Check out the AddEvent Calendar Links app on the Mailchimp marketplace to connect your AddEvent account to Mailchimp.
• Follow our helpful guide on how to start using the extension.
• If you run into any issues with the extension or need help getting set up, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected]

We're constantly adding new features and making improvements and fixes to our existing ones. Here are some of the highlights from what we've been working on over the past couple of weeks:

• The event and calendar landing pages have been updated with a beautiful new design that we think looks great. Check out some examples here: event landing page, calendar landing page. As always, our landing pages are completely customizable if you want to make it your own with a custom template.
• Event and calendar landing pages now include a timezone selector. This allows your users to set their timezone, and shows the user the event times and dates converted to that timezone before they add it to their calendar. We also predict what timezone they are in when they open the landing page, but they can change it if needed using this new selector. Previously, we were also predicting their timezone, but there was no way to change it in case we were wrong (if they were using a VPN, for example).
• We've also updated the design and added the new timezone selector to our embeddable events.
• We've tweaked the design of the embeddable calendar so it now looks even better, and in particular made improvements to the mobile view of the calendar, which had been starting to look dated.
• We've added the ability to search for timezones within the timezone selector on our embeddable calendar which means that users no longer have to scroll through the entire list to find the timezone they want to see events in.
• We've added our direct URL method to Zapier, which means that you can automatically add add-to-calendar links to your emails without writing a single line of code. Check out our separate update post below, or this quick tutorial of how to get it set up!

The Direct URL method allows you to build automated add-to-calendar links into your email campaign templates to give your users add-to-calendar links customized just for them. And now we've just made it even easier to use by including all that great functionality in the latest version of our Zapier integration. This means you can now automatically add add-to-calendar links to your emails without writing a single line of code. 

Simply connect your CRM, email campaign tool, webinar/video conferencing platform or events database with AddEvent in Zapier to unlock this powerful new functionality. Once your AddEvent account is connected in Zapier, simply choose the new "Direct URL Method" trigger from the options within the zap! Make sure you check out our 5-minute tutorial to get started.

Use cases:

• Automatically insert add-to-calendar links in confirmation and reminder emails when your users register for an event or book an appointment
• Include a unique Zoom webinar link in the calendar invite you send to each participant who signs up for your event
• Include a personalized event description for each user with information from your CRM
• Share different events with your users based on their time zone or location

Resources to check out:

• AddEvent & Zapier integration
• A quick tutorial to get you set up
• The Direct URL Method documentation

We've been busy making some fixes and improvements to our software:

• When several of our tools (add-to-calendar button, embeddable events list, embeddable calendar) were combined on a single page, the add-to-calendar button was sometimes not being positioned correctly. We've made an update to make sure the add-to-calendar button is always positioned correctly.
• In the embeddable calendar, upcoming events with a recurring rule were not showing up correctly going into the future. That has been corrected so recurring events are now displayed accurately.
• On AddEvent you can synchronize events from external calendars. Typically the dates and times of events in the external calendar feeds are in UTC time. We now automatically convert those dates and times into local time instead of leaving them in UTC.
• In the Zapier List Events trigger, all events were not being listed from across all calendars, only the Main Calendar. We have resolved the issue and released Zapier version 5.0.2 as well as migrated all users to this version so it takes effect immediately.

On a regular basis, we test the methods for adding events to calendars. We currently have two methods we would like to get back to using - those methods are: 

Outlook.com + Office 365 (direct methods).

• These two methods allow us to send the user directly to their calendar app without having to grant access to our app at Microsoft.
• These methods are getting very close to working again. They have been tested but still fail to produce good content. We’ll continue using the Microsoft Events API for inserting events into the user’s calendar until the issues have been resolved by Microsoft.

Yahoo.com (direct method)

• This method has been out of service since Yahoo updated its calendar service in January 2021. We’ve reworked how we add events to Yahoo and we’re now able to add events again. When we parse date/time to Yahoo all date formats are ignored by Yahoo. Therefore we now on the basis of the user’s IP time zone convert the events date/time to the user’s date/time and parse it to Yahoo Calendar. This leaves some room for errors but for the majority of users, it’ll work as intended.
• We obviously hope Yahoo Calendar and the team responsible for Yahoo Calendar will fix the issues the whole world is experiencing.

Yahoo’s "Add to Calendar" functionality is broken. We went down to their HQ this morning and put up a sign to let them know. We're hoping the message will go through to the right team(s) fast and that Yahoo Calendar will work again shortly. 

With events with RSVP you can use "Custom RSVP templates". The custom RSVP templates allow you to change: 

• Confirmation email (which is sent out when users RSVP for the event).
• A reminder X hours before the event occurs
• A reminder X days before the event occurs

We've added the option to send out "Follow-up Emails". The follow-up email can, if activated, be sent out X hours after the event occurs. This functionality is brilliant if you want to automatically get reviews for your event, ask your attendees what they think about the event, etc.

We've fixed some issues in relation to our recurring rules. The issues fixed include: 

• Fixed some specific recurring rules that did not work well with specific calendar vendors. 
• Improved the event landing pages to reflect the recurring rule so users would know how many times the event occurs. 
• Improved the event landing pages to show the upcoming event date, and last event date in case the event is past.

We've improved the way you can delete events in the Dashboard. 

In the Dashboard you can create three types of events: 

• Singular events
• Singular events with recurrence
• Events in a series

We've improved the event deletion process to now include all of these three events. For instance, if you try to delete an event in a series you will be able to select "this" event, "following events", or "all" events.