Summer 2024 Update

The biggest update to qplanner since its inception brings a familiar look, with fresh features.

Motivation

Ok, this isn't recipe website but I'll start with the sob story anyway.
In 2022 I went to open the full Glastonbury planner on my phone, and it crashed my browser.
Now I knew the mobile site was a bit heavy for large events, and could be slow to load, but to make a browser crash?
That's not going to reflect well on me or the website, and I had no idea how many others have had a terrible experience.
So for large events I quickly disabled part of the page, which solved the crash for me, and stewed in the embarrassment of where the project was.
Somewhere between stuck in the past, and utter irrelevance.
So that's my catalyst for this new version.
I needed something with clean, maintainable code, that wasn't mostly written in 2010.

In with the new

Loading a web page that contains the entire Glastonbury line up, for every day, all at once is naive, bloated, and slow.
So the heart of the view is a layout system that focuses on rendering only the stages you can see (plus a couple on each side).

New Features

Selection locking

Rest easy knowing you won't miss a band, or erroneously pick a random act, by locking your selection.
All you have to do is click on the padlock icon, and it will be protected from modification.
This is available on the right hand side for desktop, and in the menu for mobile users.

Stage overlap groups

Some events are hectic, and filled to brim with things to do.
This can often lead to several things being billed for one stage/area, which looks like an awful, unusable, mess on the old website.
I've added a great new way of displaying all the concurrent performances in columns on the stage.
The name and time of the performance isn't shown in the column, but the selection state is correctly reflected.
You can click on an overlapping section view a pop-up containing each column as a full width stage.
I think it's fantastic, and very handy!

High contrast text

Sometimes people aren't great with colour schemes when editing planners, and it can lead to hard to distinguish text.
By default text is now automatically the most contrasting colour for the given background. (Hopefully) So you can be sure you can read who's live right now while you're standing in the bright sunlight, wondering where to go. You can toggle this setting in the menus.

Localisation

The old website used a hard coded list of days of the week to localise text, and assumed you'd want the 12 hour clock only if you used American English.
Modern browsers have a wonderful system for localising certain things, like dates and numbers.
qplanner takes advantage of that to correctly localise dates and times for you.
And if you do/don't like the 12 hour clock, you can change the setting in the menus.

Bi-direction panning

For too long have our scrolling needs been curtailed to a single axis at a time.
Now you can enjoy realising that you can't slide your finger in a perfectly straight line, or just do some figure of eights out of boredom.
And as an added bonus quite a few things can be scrolled using the mouse just by clicking and dragging; you'll like it.

(Actually) Mobile friendly

The old mobile view was a bit of a shoehorned mess.
Adding the fancy bottom menu only disguised that a little.
So now we have a more modern, and less clunky, UI.

Fully dynamic layout

Trying to present as many days and stages as I can, whilst keeping things usable across a multitude of display sizes, is fun challenge.
The new view maximises this based on available space.
Mostly by trying to squish stages a little, to see how many can fit in. And when it's worked out what to display, it'll stretch the stages to fill any bits of remaining space.
You can play with it by resizing your browser window!

Print options visual preview

Enjoy a simplified representation of the expected print out, so you can figure out what output you want without having to guess what the option does.

Search for artists

Why scroll through a list when you can just type a few letters?

Swish social share image

You don't care about this as much as I do.
For years the preview image when you shared a link was just that red wave, on a white background, and I knew I could do better.
So now you can enjoy seeing an accurate representation of the stage times, with the same colour theme.
I think it looks fantastic.

Missing features

My time is finite, and getting every feature ready in time just wasn't possible in the end. Here's what I think is missing, that will be coming sooner than later. (I hope!)

  • Selection auto select
    This is a great feature for getting all your favourites from Spotify (or last.fm) selected in one go.
    It also lets you pick artists based on what certain radio stations have been playing, or by the genre of the acts.

  • Horizontal view
    It's coming, don't worry.

  • Weather

I think it's just those missing for feature parity.
I would like to add some features that the mobile app already has too, such as:

  • Notes
    Leave them on performances, or at times of the day.

  • Restyling: Light / Dark mode
    Don't like the how the planner is styled? It can be tastefully re-coloured.

Planner embedding

One of the goals of the new version was to enable embedding of an event's planner on another website.
This is working now for <iframe> embeds, and I'll see if I can get in page generation working later.
If you're interested in embedding an event, please let me know.
(Planners are blocked from being embeddable by default)

What if I don't like the new view?

Well I'd love to know why you feel that way.
But for now you can click this button to force the old view:

If you'd like to share a link to the old view, you can add a / after the number at the end.
And if that isn't enough you can force a particular view: /full, /mini, /horizontal, /classic, /mobile.
For example:
https://qplanner.co.uk/p/2345/
https://qplanner.co.uk/p/2345/mini

Print previews from the creator still use the old view, and until that changes I will not be removing the old view.