Announcement

The first draft of this post started with New Year, New Events Calendar Plugin – expected to be released in mid February. But although this was not our first submission in the WordPress Plugin Directory, this time the approval process was harder than imagined and took longer than expected. This was mainly due to several name rejections and some false-positive code analysis, which we later discovered is now powered by AI algorithms.

Let’s just forget about it. Since we finally managed to overcome the pitfalls 🎉🎉🎉 we are delighted to introduce the newest member of our product family:

Calendas, a modern Events Calendar Plugin for WordPress

https://them.es/plugins/calendas

You may ask yourself … Why another WordPress Calendar Plugin?

This is an easy question to answer. We are very confident that our plugin outperforms similar products on the market.

First of all it is way easier to setup, only uses a fractional of the code footprint compared to others by consequently following WordPress Block Editor best practices and reusing WordPress Core functions. Thanks to this approach, we didn’t have to start from scratch, and we can still provide all the essential features — and even more — without all the bloat!

	Calendas	Similar Plugins on the market
File size*	140 KB	6 MB – 18 MB
Block-ready	Yes	Yes
Multiple calendar views	Yes	Yes
Fully compatible with the Query loop block	Yes	No
⭐️ Featured Events	Yes	Yes
Add Google Maps to Venues	Yes	Yes
Address-Geocoding	Yes	No
Multilingual-ready in the free version	Yes	No
Seamless integration in WordPress with easy configuration and customization	Yes	No
jQuery dependency	No	Yes
Recurring events	Yes (PRO)	Yes (PRO)
RSVP and Ticket sales	Yes (PRO) – powered by WooCommerce	Yes (PRO)

* The file sizes were compared by downloading the ZIP versions of the basic plugins from the WordPress Plugin Directory (Q1/2026).

What you’ll get

• Self-hosted, Privacy-friendly, Fully managed and controlled by you on your own website
• Great look and feel out-of-the-box
• Fully customizable Calendar block with several views**
• WordPress Core technology
• Query Loop block integration
• Upcoming Events: Block and WP-Dashboard widget
• Light-weight codebase that speeds up loading time and saves valuable server resources
• Responsive layout
• Multilingual-ready
• Venues
• Organizers
• Automatic geocoding of address fields powered by openstreetmap.org
• Embedded Google Maps

** The basis of the calendar frontend is provided by the schedule-x Javascript library (MIT).

Setup

If you are familiar with the Block Editor, setting up the Plugin and publishing your first Event should be a piece of cake.

You can also create Organizer and Venue posts and link them to Events.

Multilingual websites benefit from compatibility with Polylang or WPML – even in the free version.

We have also included a configurable Upcoming Events block. And if you’re after a simple, no-frills option, all you need to do is add Core’s Query Loop block and select the ‘Events’ post type. Easy.

We’ve developed two versions of Calendas:

PRO

The PRO add-on is a WordPress plugin that can be purchased from our website at a fair one-time fee. Please note that you need to install and set up the free plugin in advance.

It comes with useful features like Recurring Events. You can also collect RSVP registrations or Sell tickets – which is powered by WooCommerce.

In addition, a user-friendly Importer and Exporter with a spreadsheet interface has been implemented – as a bonus it even let’s you migrate existing The Events Calendar events.

Furthermore you can control the Single-events view by uploading custom block templates in your theme.

If you enable the RSVP feature and want to sell event tickets, all registrations can be managed and exported via a dedicated admin page.

As a PRO user you will enjoy faster response times from the Support team.

A demo says more than 1000 words

Here, you can see a full breakdown of the calendar with all the features available:

https://them.es/plugins/calendas

If you want to play around a bit and see the backend, access our Playground here:

Playground

Don’t hesitate, give Calendas a try and share your feedback

It will take you just a couple of minutes to get up and running. We know, you’re going to love how straightforward the setup process is and how quickly your events load. The calendar interface is awesome too.

Please note that, despite thorough testing of the plugin, as with any new product, there may be bugs and glitches that we are not yet aware of. This is where you come in. We are grateful for your help in identifying and reporting potential bugs.

That said, our main focus in the upcoming product releases will be resolving any outstanding issues. Of course we are also open to all kinds of new feature requests, but please understand that these may be shifted to a major release at a later date.

You can either submit a new request through this support forum – particularly if you are a PRO user with an active license – or, if it affects the free version, via the WordPress forum or via the GitHub repository, where you can also contribute with code changes.

Thank you in advance for your questions and feedback. We are always happy to help!

Billy has been published in a new, major release, with a focus on refactoring and code cleanup. This offers many benefits to users and developers.

In case you didn’t know, Billy is an invoice and project management Plugin for WordPress that seamlessly integrates into your existing web stack. There are no external dependencies and you can rest assured that no critical information will be shared with third parties, and that you will always retain full control of your your sensitive data within your WordPress instance.

You can install the free version from the WordPress Plugin Directory. The Pro add-on offers additional features like Contact management, To dos and more. You can buy it for a reasonable one-time fee from our website. There are no hidden costs, and you will not be tied to any ongoing contracts or incur any recurring charges.

Best of all: Customers who have previously purchased a valid v1 license can upgrade to v2 free of charge.

What has changed in Billy v2.0?

• There are lots of improvements under the hood – in particular, all blocks have been migrated to the latest Blocks API v3
  • This improves stability, performance and compatibility with the upcoming WordPress version which will be released next week on December 2, 2025
  • Backwards compatibility of existing posts should be fully maintained
• New option to define a custom financial year instead of the default “01 January – 31 December”
• Invoice and quote numbers can now be auto-reset to 0 on an annual basis
• WordPress users can be assigned to To do checklists – open and due assignments will be output in the user’s dashboard widget
• Generated PDFs now support Emojis via a fallback that loads the respective images from the w.org CDN – this is optional and can be disabled
• Support for the new Notes feature has been added in all custom post types
• Numerous long-standing front-end issues have now been resolved
• The PHP codebase has been optimized and outdated bloat and deprecations have been removed
• The minimum supported WordPress version has been bumped to v6.6 – nevertheless, it’s always best to use the latest stable version
• Billy has been tested with the RC version of the upcoming WordPress v6.9 release

Please help us test the new release

Bugs can always occur during major refactoring, so we would be very grateful if you could help us test the new release. If you notice a bug, please create a new support request on this site to let us know. Of course you can also open a new issue on WordPress.org (or even create a pull request on GitHub) if the bug affects the free version.

Don’t forget to inform us about your WordPress configuration and provide any necessary information, such as screenshots and error logs, to help resolve the issue quickly and easily.

Questions and Answers

Docs

To celebrate our 10^th anniversary, we decided to give them.es a makeover. Our goal was to maintain a sense of familiarity while refining some elements, refreshing the color scheme and replacing the default font. We also reviewed web accessibility and fixed some contrast errors to improve readability.

Many technical features have been upgraded code-wise, with the aim of improving the user experience and ensuring compatibility with the upcoming WordPress v6.9 release. In addition, a cool and useful Product filter has been added to the front page.

We would love to hear your thoughts on the new, fresh look and feel. You can either leave your comments below or submit the feedback form anonymously.

Are you managing an online community around a 🏢 business, ⚽ hobby or 🎗️ cause where users can discuss topics with others? Or are you in the technical evaluation phase because you are not satisfied with the current setup of your online forum? And do you ❤️ WordPress?

Look no further. We are now offering a slick, flexible and well-crafted WordPress Theme for that very purpose. By the way. It has also been used as base of the site you’re browsing right now.

What you’ll get…

• them.es Support is a Block Theme powered by WordPress 6.5+ making use of the new Interactivity API, so all the standard features from WordPress, like enhanced query pagination, posts, comments, user profiles, categories, tags are available out of the box.
• Convenient community features and effective user management:
  • Users can Mark topics as (un)resolved
  • Users can Like posts/comments
  • Users can Report posts/comments for admin review
  • Users can Search with an autocomplete feature
  • @User mentions
  • Unresolved topics widget
  • Markdown syntax
  • Users can upload an Avatar
  • Users can request a data export from the profile
  • Frontend editing experience powered by the new Interactivity API
• The design can be fully customized in the Site Editor. It has two built-in styles: Light/Dark.
• Creating a Child Theme, like we did on this site, is supported. We incorporated a unique design and extended the code base with add-ons like a File uploader and Sidebar widgets that output data retrieved from external APIs.
• Continuous Support and updates are available to all customers who purchase a license.

How to purchase…

• As usual we offer a fair deal with a lifetime license here: https://them.es/themes/support-theme
• Of course, it comes with a money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied during the trial period.

How to customize…

• The Site Editor allows you to make design adjustments such as updating styles, adding a custom webfont or editing existing templates.
• If you want to make more extensive changes or add new features, it’s best to create a Child Theme or install a Plugin.
• If there are translations missing in your language, you can help out. Contributing translations is really easy (login required!): https://them.es/themes/support-theme/docs

We would be delighted to have your interest and are confident that you and your community will love working with this Theme.

Feel free to ask any (presale) questions in the comments section below.

We’re keeping a good pace and just released v1.9.0 of our free and v1.5.0 v1.5.1 of our premium billing and project management plugin for WordPress.

Finally a highly requested feature – the ability to send invoices and quotes as email attachments via a webform – has been implemented in the Pro version. Default values like email subject and email body can be defined globally. But it’s also possible to add a personal touch to the email and change the values individually per post.

As a consequence this makes sharelinks more or less obsolete and we decided to deprecate this feature without hard feelings. Password protected sharelinks lacked some important abilities (like downloading PDFs) and according to our knowledge and feedback from the community they were not used very often. In the end the email webforms are more convenient and even more secure because no passwords need to be sent to customers in cleartext anymore.

Existing links will continue to work for the time being but it will not be possible to create new sharelinks anymore.

Incorporating e-invoices is another important milestone in this release. Although PDF invoices are just fine if both contracting parties agreed on accepting them, the future belongs to transmitting documents in an electronic data interchange format. Heads up: E-invoices may even be required by law in your country sooner or later in a B2B or B2G context…

That’s why Billy invoices can now also be generated in the UBL XML format which is an open standard for electronic business documents. This feature is optional, needs to be explicitly enabled in the Customizer and has been marked as “beta”. Your help in testing the implementation is more than welcome.

Please be informed that an upgrade to at least WordPress v6.5 is mandatory if you want to use all new features as we developed with state-of-the-art technology like the Interactivity API to give you the look and feel you deserve. Falling back to an old approach was a no go. So if you’re still on an old WordPress version you can update the plugin but won’t be able to benefit from some of the cool new stuff.

Meanwhile WordPress is already in the 6.6 prerelease phase and since we thoroughly tested Billy with the current beta version, no compatibility issues are expected when WordPress 6.6 gets released in less than a month.

Billy – our Billing suite for WordPress – has received some useful updates in the latest release and even comes with new premium features in the Pro version.

Quote numbers can now be auto-incremented, similar to invoices. This is optional and the old default “Ymd” number format is still available. An useful addition to invoice and quote number prefixes are the placeholder variables {YEAR}, {MONTH} and {DAY} which means that you are now able to define number formats like INV-2024-05-13-12345678910 or similar.

A highly requested feature was having a fully customizable PDF footer layout. That’s why a reusable block pattern, similar to the PDF header, has been added in the block editor.

In addition, the PDF table output has been improved and inner borders are now enabled by default. Note that in the Pro version the PDF styles (of the table design and even more) can still be modified using custom CSS.

Speaking about the Billy Pro add-on. This release has received a major upgrade with two completely new enhancements and is available for all existing customers, having a lifetime license, with no additional costs. And best of all, the price for new users has not been raised.

After you update the plugin you’ll get cool project management features like checklists in Kanban-style boards and a simple time tracking tool.

By ensuring a smooth workflow and using a modular approach with full WordPress block editor compatibility, the editing experience should be an easy ride.

With the addition of two new Billy admin pages, the time had come to restructure and combine all pages in a single dashboard menu in order to keep the WordPress admin sidebar tidy.

An important advice as this can’t be said often enough: Your WordPress data will never leave your server and guarding against data corruption, breach or loss should be a matter of course. That’s even more important after Billy’s evolvement to a full project management suite.

First of all it’s vital to care about your site’s health and keep your system up-to-date. In addition a proper backup strategy should not be neglected – and in this case the WordPress ecosystem can provide lots of mature backup and restoration solutions that get the job done easily.

When was the last time you reviewed and improved this process?

Many thanks 👋 to the engaged community for the valuable feedback that initiated the work on some of these features und bug fixes. There are still some requests and ideas in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more!