600 Venues

WOW…I have the exact same issue with further clarification needed and a request from the client. Because we’re using the Community Events add-on I think our duplicate venues are because the members either aren’t checking for the venue and/or are adding them with very slight difference (ie: caps, abbreviations, etc). They want to know if you would consider developing an additional feature that would be able to alert a person when they’re entering something that is similar to something already there! Good idea!

AND, from your response to OP it sounds like if we simply remove all dupes any events assigned to them will no longer list a venue. Is that right? Or would they completely disappear? It would be nice if we’d get a warning and an opportunity to reassign them! Much as happens in WP when you remove an author!

Just sayin’…. seems to be a HUGE problem when having a wide assortment of community members adding to the calendar. Thanks.

Hi Sheila,

In our current version of TEC/ECP and Community Events, if no Venue is selected and all the venue fields are left blank, no Venue will be created for the event. But, if any of the fields are filled in for the Venue, one will be created and there is currently no facility to be able to detect a duplicate but I could see value in this (especially for Community submitted events) and will create a feature request for it.

One thing you could do in the short term is put a clear message on the Community form indicating that users need to be careful with how they input Venus but I realize this may be useless because if different users are submitting events, then how would they be able to know the subtle differences in how Venues were named.

What about an option to turn off the ability for certain users or roles to add new Venues? That way you’d run into the problem much less I’d assume.

Thoughts? Benji, feel free to chime in here as well.

Thanks,
– Jonah

Hey Sheila,

I believe your first question is answered in our FAQ:

I don’t want other contributors on my site having access to the backend “Organizers” or “Venues” sections in PRO. How can I take them out entirely?

These options cannot be removed from the admin bar without potentially breaking the entire plugin in the process. As a workaround, just change the permissions on the Organizer/Venue custom post types so that only admins (or whatever level of access you deem appropriate) can see them. This won’t carry over to EventCategories, but will keep Organizer and Venue data locked down.

If you remove venues from the dashboard, the associated events will remain. They simply won’t have a Venue or address displayed.

Does that answer your questions?

~Leah

Hi Sheila,

Actually there is no easy way to adjust the post type directly through our plugin at the moment. You would need to modify core files and this is not recommended because your changes will be lost the next time you update. I’ll update/remove that FAQ since it doesn’t really apply anymore.

Back to the issue at hand… First, to hide the Venue form on the Community Submit Event form from non-admins you do the following. Make a copy of /wp-content/plugins/events-community/views/events-meta-box.php and place in an ‘events/community/’ folder within your active theme. Then find lines 89 – 120, this code deals with the Event Location display/form inputs. What you want to do is wrap this code in a conditional statement that says, only display this if the current user is an admin. You can do this with the following conditional:

if ( current_user_can('manage_options')) {

}

So, you basically just need to wrap those lines of code inside that conditional statement and then the Event Location form will not display for any users that cannot manage options in the administration. Here’s a copy of the file with the modification in place: http://snippi.com/s/ozvpyxi

Does that help?

As far as deleting all the duplicate Venues… basically if a Venue is associated to an event and you delete it, only the Venue will be deleted not the event. Does that answer your question?

Let me know if you need anything else with this.

Thanks,
Jonah

You’re welcome Sheila! Let me know how things go and if you need any more help with this.

– Jonah

Hi Sheila,

Sure, you can do this. Just comment out this line like so in your events-meta-box.php override file:

//include( $venue_meta_box );

That will prevent the rest of the form from showing.

– Jonah

YIKES…my bad! I wish I could remove my last post but alas no edit options.
I accidentally FTP’d the wrong file and so OF COURSE there was no change! Your commenting out worked great. I was able to figure out which line to comment out for the organizers as well so both work as desired now.

I’m going to look and see if I can find where to change the text that says Add New Venue to Choose your Venue instead. And maybe I’ll be able to add text to that form that says if your venue isn’t listed email admin@.

I think we’re good. Sorry for the panic.