New Year New Features

qplanner is starting the new year with a raft of new features!

Stub Planners

Introducing Stub Planners, a better way of making a planner in the build up to stage times being released.
Stub planners have a familiar look that's similar to many festival announcement posters.
They're easily created in the creator, by switching to Stub mode, and dragging & dropping the artists.
You can edit in stub mode without losing any stage times, the data for each mode is independent, so you can feely switch between the two while editing a planner.

Stub mode has sections for Headliners, Notable performers, and Normal performers.
Sections can be left blank.
And you can have either one large group of those sections, sections per day, or per stage.
This can be selected in the Stub section at the bottom of the left sidebar.
You can also switch away from Stub mode, back to the full editor from that menu too.
To switch to Stub mode, open the options dialog and click the new, large, stub mode button.

Stub mode has a couple of helper functions to help speed things up.

  • Filtering the list of artists
  • Import or remove a list of artists all at once
  • Sort sections alphabetically (Or just the currently selected section)
  • Add any remain artists to the currently selected selection

You can also enable duplicate artists, should one play on multiple days or stages, if that makes sense for how you'd like to display things.
There's also an option to limit the number of artists that are displayed to the user, per section.

When using sections per day the planner will use the colours from the relevant day theme, and similarly for sections per stage, the stage theme will be used.
I do think the page does need a background of some sort, but that will be something for the future.

When viewing a stub planner you will see the dates of the event, and the number of days until it begins, displayed below the event name.

Please use this feature if you're making an unofficial planner before the stage times are available.
Visitors to the website do not appreciate seeing misleading stage times, and stub planners save people from confusion and disappointment.

As with everything else, I am open to feedback, and constructive criticism, about this new feature.

New Planner dialog

You'll be greeted by this whenever you start a new planner from now on.
It's to help people use the correct mode initially, and to let newer users pick the right theme for their event.

Stage Visual Style

To help accommodate the vast array of visual styles that events use I've added 3 new settings.
You can access them via the Global Colour Theme window, click on the new Stage style, in the right hand column.

Column Width

Set the width of stage columns from 0 to 100%. The default is 100%.
This option is correctly reflected in PDFs, where as the other options are not.

Rounding

You have the choice of: None, Small (default), and Large.
The rest of the UI currently does not reflect this choice, please get in touch if it's important to you.

Alignment

Top, Middle (default), and Bottom.

New features implemented when viewing planners

In previous updates I added a raft of small things to the creator, those features are now available when viewing a planner.

Doors

Setting the door times will block off sections of the start or end of the day, along with listing the appropriate time.
These are shown on the planner view, stage overview, and on PDFs.

Signed performances

You'll see a little icon in the bottom right of a performance if it's signed.
This is displayed everywhere.

Initial Stage info

Previously stage info (compère and age restrictions) could only be applied throughout a day.
You can now set the initial stage for a stage, and stages with such will have an extra 𝒊 next to the stage name.
Clicking the stage title of any stage shows the running order of that stage, but now stages with initial stage info will show that data before the running order.
Stage labels will also be displayed here too.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • [caching] More cache fixes, for viewing planners, and their social images
  • Empty stage info is now ignored when viewing a planner
  • Slat times in 12 hour mode will only show the meridian on the hour, to reduce repetition
  • Fixed granularity affecting the start time when switching directions
  • Minor performance improvement when creating the planner view
  • [preview] Avoid loading/saving selections when previewing a planner
  • Stage Info now shows a microphone if only the compère is changing
  • [creator] Improve importing artist names from a list
  • [creator] Add functionality for bulk removing of artists
  • [creator] Show stage info in stage titles
  • [PDF] Use the event's timezone for the last edited message in the footer

What's coming next

It'll likely be bug fixes and polish for things in this update.
I do need to start work on the mobile app again, there's a significant amount of work to do.
More work on embedding, plus work on documentation and showcasing qplanner's features would be very nice too.