As new development iterations get completed, more and more exciting features find their way into Easy!Appointments, making the app even better release by release. During the feature selection, design and implementation phases the user community feedback is taken into careful consideration, so that the end results can serve the community needs and meet the high standards of the project. The upcoming version 1.5 is no exception to that and in this post, you will find out some of its highlights.
CalDAV Integration
For those not familiar with the CalDAV standard, it is part of the bigger set of remotely executed tasks called WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning). The goal of this standard is to provide a common interface for the communication of different software solutions. In particular, CalDAV is the part of WebDAV that refers and handles the calendar related functionality.
Being already accepted as the common standard interface among the most commonly used applications, most applications already support CalDAV and thus allow users to manage their calendar information from many different applications.
As an example for such integrations, you should know that it is possible to add a Google Calendar to the Apple Calendar application and vice versa, even though the data are being stored and originate from different services.
Starting from version 1.5, Easy!Appointments will support CalDAV and thus you will be able to add the calendar of a provider into your favorite calendar application and see and manage your data and information externally.
LDAP Integration
Similarly to WebDAV, LDAP is a protocol that is extremely useful, mostly at professional level infrastructure, as it allows the centralized user management and authentication between different applications. Again, this is also a common standard that is widely accepted and there are also many different implementations of this protocol (OpenDirectory, ActiveDirectory etc).
Open directories are being used in organizations that store many different user accounts and re-use them in multiple different applications. This way the users that are part of this organization do not need to maintain multiple accounts or credentials but can sign in to any LDAP capable service with the same credentials.
Starting from version 1.5, Easy!Appointments will support the LDAP protocol and any self hosted installation will be able to connect to an existing user directory and have their users being imported into the app automatically.
Vendor Upgrades
Easy!Appointments is based on various different third party software, that enables the application to provide the ultimate scheduling experience. Such vendor packages, also get new features and improved functionality and have to be updated from time to time.
On of the most important updates is FullCalendar, the main widget behind the Easy!Appointments calendar page, which has shifted away from jQuery and now uses a lightweight data reactivity framework, called Preact, for rendering the calendar elements and events on the screen. The migration to the new version will affect central code pieces of the Easy!Appointments JavaScript codebase.
Another important update of this release will be the upgrade to Bootstrap 5, which is the latest stable release of the most popular UI framework. The migration to the new version is not expected to be drastically changing the existing markup, but many view and JavaScript files will be updated.
Moving forward, Easy!Appointments aims to be adding new exciting features and getting better in every possible way. You can easily keep up with the current progress by staring and following the project on GitHub and stay up to date with the latest development updates.
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