A few of things to consider

[Kevin]

1) I just purchased the Facebook Events Importer with the sole purpose of importing the many past events for a site I am building. There doesn’t seem to be any mention that the auto-importer doesn’t handle this. After going through several pages of the Support Forums, I see I am not the only person encountering this. Maybe it should be stated somewhere before people purchase it with that intent?

2) If an event doesn’t have an image, it creates a broken image in the WordPress Media section, and links the Featured Image for the event to it. This causes a broken image on pages displaying the event.

3) I see there is a functions.php hack to add a link back to the facebook event page, but why isn’t it using the ‘Event Website’ -> ‘URL’ field by default, rather than creating a new place for the URL? I would think that would be the default action without needing any hacking.

—
That’s it for now as I have just started using the plugin, but now I need to go through removing broken images and adding the facebook event URLs to the Event Website -> URL field.

[Kevin]

One other thing to note that I have noticed…

4) In list view, logically, shouldn’t past events be listed in descending date order on the page?

[Kevin]

Another thing that would be nice:

5) Make it possible to set the permalinks for events so they may use ‘Day and name’ in case you have multiple events with the same name.

[Hunter]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the well-written, thought out post 🙂

To address a few of your questions/concerns:

1 – When we develop and package our products, we typically include the features and capabilities rather than the limitations. We leave that up to the customer to decide on whether or not the plugin meets their requirements. While it would be nice for us to be able to do what you describe, it would be nearly impossible to address every thing the plugin doesn’t do.

2 – A php function is being used to call the event images. Just like any WordPress page, post, etc, when an image is missing, you’ll see what you describe. This is typical WordPress behavior. If you’re interested in creating custom templates, you can read how to do so by reading through our Themer’s Guide.

3 – We consider all possibilities when developing our plugins. What some users feel should be a default feature, others may have no use for. Striking the perfect balance is what we’re always aiming for.

4 – We do have a Knowledgebase article on how to Show past events in reverse chronologic order.

5 – Not a bad idea. This one might be worth adding to our UserVoice Feature Ideas. We’re always looking for new and improved ways to please our customers, starting with giving them a concrete place to rally around particular ideas.

Thanks again for the detailed post and I hope I’ve acknowledged some of your questions/recommendations in the manner you were hoping. Have a good week and if you have any other questions/comments, feel free to open a new thread.

[Author]

Posts