Correct procedure to start using Ical Importer on current populated TEC Pro

[Chris Adams]

Hi,
I tried to set a client up some time ago with TEC Pro and Ical Importer to allow for an initial and then automated imports of events from a Google Calendar (ical) feed.
Alas at the time there were bugs in that any ‘All Day Event’ was imported with a date of 1 Jan 1970. This I reported and am glad to say that it had been fixed in subsequent releases (though I have yet to test it).
After I have set up a test environment and confirmed it is indeed all tickety-boo I will need to (re-)instate the feed on my client’s website, only thing is that they have been adding events into Google and then manually adding them to their website while the importer had bugs – so what would be the best way for me to initiate the importer so that they don’t get any duplicate content when it is run?
Should I remove all venues / organisers / events on the website manually and then run the corresponding imports or can I just go ahead and run it?
Clearly I will make sure there is a backup of the database first!
Thanks for your help.
Chris

[Cliff]

Hi. Thanks for your detailed question.

There’s no way for the iCal Importer to know “Google Event X” is the same as “WP manually-created / pre-existing Event Y”. Same for Organizers and Venues data.

Therefore, there’s going to have to be some manual effort here.

Your decision on whether or not to delete before importing or delete duplicates after importing might be influenced by whether or not the feeds you’re importing are the official source of information or not, for example. You might also want to use the iCal Importer’s option to only import events from a specified date and newer (not events prior to this date).

Something to note: Once you get events importing via iCal Importer, know that iCal Importer was recently changed to NOT overwrite/update existing (i.e. previously-imported) events, since users might make local changes and wish for those changes to persist.

You should be able to use the tribe_events_ical_importer_overwrite_existing_events filter to re-enable this functionality. This hook can be found in /wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar-importer-ical/src/Tribe/Importer.php if you’d like to look into this further.

I hope this information helps. Please let me know if you need anything else.

[Chris Adams]

Hey thanks for that Cliff, I’ll have a look at that filter and get back to you 🙂

[Cliff]

Thanks. Looking forward to hearing back…

[Support Droid]

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