.csv import is ignoring the events category column

[Alison]

Hi Geoff,

Thank you for the follow up and thank you for all of your help and patience with this issue. We really love this plugin and use it for all of our sites that implement calendars!

Alison

[Alison]

Also I noticed on our account that it still states our license is still expiring in a week. I was told it would be extended for another month?

thank you

[Alison]

Hi Geoff,

Could you please extend my license for another month it states that it will be expiring in 4 days.

Thanks!

[Barry]

Hi Alison,

Thanks for your patience so far and our apologies for the delayed responses: as Geoff noted, Josh has been unavailable recently – that combined with unusually high volumes of support requests have unfortunately meant we weren’t quite as responsive here as we normally are.

Also I noticed on our account that it still states our license is still expiring in a week. I was told it would be extended for another month?

I’m unsure why this didn’t take effect – but have now extended it for a further month 🙂

I would like to be clear though that we can’t guarantee this feature will be implemented within that timeframe, nor can we keep extending your license indefinitely (and I’m sure you don’t expect us to – but I felt it best to clarify this simply to ensure your expectations are not set incorrectly). It’s also worth bearing in mind that CSV import is a core feature that ships with our free plugin, The Events Calendar, and so is not directly related to Events Calendar PRO itself.

For our perspective this is a proposed feature request rather than a bug and given there doesn’t seem to be a lot of demand for it across the community it’s not our very highest priority: we’ll evaluate it and make a decision on taking it forward in due course, but I’d hate to leave you with a promise of a fast turnaround when that isn’t really something you should count on in this specific instance.

Thanks once again for your patience and if you have any follow-up questions about this please let me know and I’ll do my best to get you an answer – of course, for any other unrelated issues that crop up please do post a fresh support topic 🙂

[Alison]

Hi Barry,

I understand and appreciate your patience and help with this as well. I just wanted to make sure my license didn’t end and I wouldn’t be able to continue this thread communication.

But as I’ve stated many times in this thread that this was a feature for the 1st year that we were implementing this plugin and the issue started around December 2015 so from my perspective this is a bug and should be fixed as soon as possible since this is the way we are able to use the plugin within our website. I agree that it is probably not specifically related to the Pro version but still the deals with the .csv importer for plugin in general.

I want to make sure this isn’t going to be categorized as a proposed feature request and still considered a priority. We use this plugin for most of our client websites that use calendars so please advise.

Thank you
Alison

[Barry]

Hi Alison,

I appreciate your standpoint but I’m afraid I disagree with your assessment of this as a bug.

If the importer locates what it believes is the same event (ie, it has already been imported) then it does not create a new event, rather it updates the existing one. The criteria for determining what counts as the same event has essentially remained unchanged: it is one where title, start and end dates are the same – and this has been the case since CSV imports rolled out in our 3.2 release.

So, if you import from the following CSV data:

title, startdate, starttime, enddate, endtime, category
Test Event, 2016-04-20, 1000, 2016-04-20, 1500, blue

You will end up with a an event called Test Event categorized in the blue category. If you subsequently import the following CSV (where the only change is the category):

title, startdate, starttime, enddate, endtime, category
Test Event, 2016-04-20, 1000, 2016-04-20, 1500, red

Then you won’t end up with a second event of the same name, instead the existing Test Event will be updated and re-categorized under the red category.

Again, this hasn’t changed since version 3.2 and if you experienced something different prior to December 2015 that was itself either an unintentional bug or, as Josh suggested, it may simply be that the source data had subtle differences in terms of the titles and dates which meant they weren’t seen as the same event.

I’m sorry, but unless we’ve misunderstood you this isn’t something we will be treating as a bug: it’s the intended behaviour. We’re open to changing it or adding enhancements to help achieve what you are aiming for, but doing so will mean we need to introduce a new setting or at least a new filter hook (so that we can ensure users who understandably expect the intended historic behaviour as detailed above are not taken by surprise).

Perhaps, as a workaround, you could incorporate the category into the event title in the following form (where blue would of course be the category):

My Event Title [blue]

With a small customization you could remove any bracketed category text from the titles prior to displaying them: that way, you would have unique events ‘per calendar’.

I hope that clarifies things and also gives you some avenues to explore in the near term.

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Leah]

Hi there,

I just wanted to pop in here and give you an update. While we weren’t able to get this feature into our upcoming 4.2 release, it is still on our list of ideas to implement in future releases.

We appreciate your patience, and we will be sure to update this thread when we have more news. Thank you for your continued support, and keep an eye out for version 4.2 coming in the next few weeks!

Best,
Leah
and The Events Calendar team

[Author]

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