Day Planner 0.10 was released on the 25th of March! This release is, imho, a great step forward from 0.9. It fixes various minor bugs, cleans up parts of the UI, handles strange or broken iCalendar files better, enforces UTF-8 encoding on the calendar and adds a plugin system.

The largest new feature is the plugin system. Day Planner now comes with support for plugins, complete with a simple file format that allows users to easily install third party plugins. Its purpose is of course to make it easy for other people to alter the behaviour of Day Planner, or add features to it easily, without having to resort to patching the app itself, but also to make it easier for me to add optional features that perhaps not everyone wants (for instance, 0.10 comes with a tray icon plugin. It is disabled by default, but those that want to use it can do so quite easily). The API is simple, and somewhat inspired by the Gtk2-perl API, to make it feel somewhat familiar for people already used to signal-based programming.

The tarball comes with an example plugin, plugins/HelloWorld.pm that is well commented and explains how to do some of the basic things like hooking into signals, displaying simple dialog boxes and adding events to the calendar. The API itself is documented in DP::CoreModules::Plugin (access the documentation by running perldoc modules/DP-CoreModules/lib/DP/CoreModules/Plugin.pm from the base directory of the Day Planner tarball or git repo).

If you want to write a plugin, and need some help or pointers, feel free to join the Day Planner irc channel, #dayplanner on irc.freenode.net and I’ll be glad to help.

Git

As mentioned earlier, Day Planner is now using git instead of subversion. After I learned git I now greatly prefer it over subversion, and have thus moved all of my projects to it. Information on how to use the Day Planner git repo can be found at http://www.day-planner.org/index.php/development/git: