Database Error: Unable to connect to the database

[Sheryl L Gossman]

Just purchased Events Calendar pro and it will not work no matter what we do. Get the error “Database Error: Unable to connect to the database” when I navigate to communitychrisitan.org/events

Have not changed any settings
There are no conflicting/events urls
We use permalinks – our current structure is communitychristian.org/%category%/%posts%
Have tried changing the link to /calendar or anything else – no change
Have uninstalled and re-installed with plugins deactivated – nothing.
Have had my IT guy go through our database and can’t find any errors.
Have confirmed that this plugin should be working with the Jupiter 5 theme.

[Jennifer]

Hi Sheryl,

Thanks for reaching out, and I’m sorry you’re running into this issue! Could you please share your system information with me? It sounds like you’ve already tested for conflicts with your other plugins, but have you tried switching to a default theme like Twenty Seventeen to see if you still get the error? If you’d like to do this in a staging site, the WP Staging plugin will let you create a quick copy of your site that you can use for testing.

Can you also go into your wp-config.php file and enable WP_DEBUG, then try going to the /events page again (or whatever you have changed the default event page to) and see if you get any additional error messages? Make sure to disable WP_DEBUG again after testing.

Let me know what you find!

Thanks,

Jennifer

[Jennifer]

One other question – were you able to get to the default events page with just The Events Calendar installed – before installing and activating Pro?

[Sheryl L Gossman]

Enabling the WP-Debug in the php file did not return any additional errors.

The calendar did not work even after installing pro and changing the default permalink did not work.

However, I tested this out in a copy of our site – turned off all the plugins, installed the events calendar basic plugin and it still did not work. Then I changed the default permalink from /events to /calendars and it worked. Turned on the plugins one at a time, testing the calendar with each one and it remained working. I installed The Events Calendar pro – it worked. Then I installed the Filter toolbar plugin and it broke again. Returning a 404 error if I went to /calendars. I went through the same process, deactivating all plugins one at at time – testing the calendar in between. I got a 404 error the whole time. Then I deactivated the Events Calendar plugin, reactivated it, and it worked again. Reactivated the Events Calendar pro, and the Filter toolbar – and it remained working.

This only thing I can think of that could be a conflict is Yoast SEO Premium. The premium version of this plugin tries to re-direct your old URL anytime you make changes to a post or page title to avoid 404 errors. Our site had a default URL prior to installing The Events Calendar of /events. When I installed The Events Calendar the very first time, I changed our default /events to /ourevents so the calendar would not conflict – but I think this somehow corrupted something because Yoast SEO premium was trying to re-write that URL back to /events. I have since deactivated the Yoast SEO premium plugin and I am just using the basic version and its been working. I am only guessing at this being the problem. But so far, its working on our live site.

Not sure if that helps in your end for troubleshooting or if there is anything else I need to do.

[Jennifer]

Hi Sheryl,

Thanks for doing all of that testing! Many of our users use Yoast with our plugins, and there are occasionally some conflicts. However, they usually have to do with plugin settings, which is the good news! Can you try reenabling Yoast Premium and changing some of the settings there like disabling the URL rewriting feature you are referring to to see if you can get it working with The Events Calendar? Also, are you using any caching plugins, like WP Total Cache?

If you could share your system information with me, that would be helpful as well!

Thanks,

Jennifer

[Sheryl L Gossman]

This reply is private.

[Jennifer]

Hi Sheryl,

Thanks for sharing that info! I haven’t been able to reproduce this issue on my end (and so far I haven’t seen any other reports of it), but it sounds like you are able to use Yoast Premium with everything working correctly by disabling the re-write feature? As I mentioned before, many of the conflicts we see with the Yoast plugin are able to be resolved by adjusting the settings within Yoast, so I would also recommend doing some tests there as well to see if you can find any particular settings that may be causing this issue.

If not, I’m glad to hear that it’s at least working with the code you added! If you have any other questions, please let me know!

Thanks,

Jennifer

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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