Displaying events elsewhere?

[Tom Stone]

Hello,

I and a few friends are doing performances during the autumn, and we sell tickets via Events Calendar + Events Tickets Plus at [EventSite].
But each of us also have our personal sites, let’s call them [PersonSite1], [PersonSite2] and [PersonSite3]. All wordpress sites.

Is there a good, prefered or recommended way to make each of the different [PersonSiteN]’s to display the upcoming events from the [EventSite] in a sidebar?
I mean, it is possible to use the WordPress’ RSS Widget, but it doesn’t show the events in the correct order. It feels like there should be a solution for this, but I’ve been unable to find it. Or do I need to copy the standard RSS widget and modify it myself?

Grateful for any suggestions or leads!

[Geoff B.]

Good afternoon Johan and welcome back!

Thank you for reaching out to us.
I would love to help you with this topic.

I believe the solution is to use our Events Aggregator service: https://theeventscalendar.com/product/event-aggregator/
Among other things, this allows you to import events from other the Events Calendar websites (as long as they are using a recent version).

Once imported each of these events could be assigned a category (this can be set as part of the import).

From there you can simply use widgets filtered by category.

Let me know if that helps.

Have a great day!

Geoff B.

[Tom Stone]

Hm… Your suggestion is that every person in the group pays $90 dollar each, and that they each install a big events plugin that they don’t really need, just to display a little RSS feed in a sidebar widget?

Ok, forget that I asked. I should have known better…

• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by Tom Stone.

[Geoff B.]

Good afternoon Johan,

Thank you for writing back.
I am sorry my suggestion did not meet your requirements.

I was merely providing you with the easiest way to achieve your goal.

For the record, you actually might not need to buy Event aggregator for each member of the group.
The reason for that is that the Event Aggregator license works with a limit of imports per day, but is not tied to a specific domain.

To clarify even further, one import = one import job, not one event.

With that in mind, let me know if there is anything else I can help you with on this topic.

Best regards,

Geoff B.

[Tom Stone]

The reason for that is that the Event Aggregator license works with a limit of imports per day, but is not tied to a specific domain.

Aha, that was not clear from the product page. I assumed that one domain = one license
So if I buy one $89 license, how many websites can the Event Aggregator be installed on? Would one licence be enough to cover installation on ten different websites?

[Geoff B.]

Good afternoon Johan,

Sorry about the confusion.

To answer your question, there is no limit that I am aware of as far as the number of websites is concerned.

The limit is on the number of import batches (jobs) per day.
So if 10 websites are doing 9 scheduled imports every day, that comes to 90.

This means that it looks like 100 scheduled imports per day should cover your needs.

But I am only speculating about your needs here.

Let me know if that helps.

Have a great day!

Geoff B.

[Tom Stone]

Still seems like an extreme overkill to ask a lot of people to install two big plugins they have no other use for, just to display a RSS feed.

And I’m not sure how I can control how many imports others decide to do per day.
Let’s say 100 people install these two plugins on their personal sites, to display the RSS from the event site, setting it to one import/day. If one of them accidentally sets it to 2 imports/day, does that mean the plugins stop to work on the other 99 sites? Seems very complicated to troubleshoot as well.

Nope, this is neither a practical nor functional solution. Since Events Calendar outputs a RSS feed, I thought there existed a way for an arbitrary amount of others to subscribe and display that feed, as in the attached drawing, in right order.
But I’ll guess the sole fuctional option is to take a standard RSS widget, hack it and offer it for download.

Thanks!

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Johan,

First off, I would like to apologize for the delay answering.
We are currently experiencing a higher level of requests than usual.

Please rest assured that we are working hard at correcting this situation.
We appreciate your patience while we try to normalize things.

Your questions and concerns are highly relevant in your specific situation.
In order to avoid any confusion, my recommended solution was not to display RSS from the event site, but rather to actually import the events themselves.

That being said, it is possible that a simple RSS feed integration would indeed be more suited to your needs. If you want to go down that route, if you have not already done so, I would highly recommend reading:

1. https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/events-rss-feed/
2. https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/customize-rss-feed/

does that mean the plugins stop to work on the other 99 sites?

What that means is that the imports will stop for the day when the limit is reached.
They will resume in a queue-like fashion the next day until the limit is reached again (or not if the volume is lower).

I thought there existed a way for an arbitrary amount of others to subscribe and display that feed

As you have read in the articles above, people can subscribe and display the events RSS feeds all they want. You can even customize the feed a tad.

The downside, is that things are limited to what the articles describes unfortunately.

Hopefully that is enough for what you need.

Best regards,

Geoff B.

[Tom Stone]

Thank you for those links, Geoff.
Despite being an interesting read, they do not help. And I still get the feeling that we might be talking past each other. So let me start over from the beginning

Look, I think there was a reason you guys decided to create a RSS feed for the events. And I believe that reason is that you assumed people would have an use for it. Or there would be no RSS feed at all.

And looking at the RSS feed itself, both with Firefox default stylesheet and the actual XML code, it is exactly what I want and need – a simple listing of events, in their chronological order. Awesome! Perfect! Excellent! Can’t wish for more!

The problem is that the standard WordPress RSS widget ignores the chronological order given in the feed.

I don’t know which order it uses instead, but I think it sorts by reversed post date, most new post at the top, oldest at the bottom. See the attached image.

That rather defeats the whole purpose of having an RSS feed for upcoming events.

Since your RSS feed isn’t compatible with the standard WordPress RSS widget, do you know if there are any third-party RSS widgets that are compatible with the RSS feed your plugin generates, and can show the events in the same order as in the actual feed. Or is the only option to hack the standard widget?

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Johan,

You are absolutely right. The RSS is there for our customers to use for all sorts of interesting applications.

You are also right that the default WordPress RSS widget sorts by post date as opposed to using something like the event date. This is because of the very nature of what RSS feeds are typically used for: blog posts.

In that context, it makes sense to use reverse post date. So in short, the RSS widget was meant with that very specific and limited goal in mind.

However, I do not believe this impairs the usefulness of the feed for what you want to do.
It simply means that:

1. You might want to tweak the built-in RSS widgets behaviour via a code snippet (at least add a conditional so that our RSS events feed is sorted differently by it)
2. Use a better plugin that offers more control over the sorting (filtering) of the items coming from the feed. Unfortunately, I do not have a specific plugin to recommend for you.

Just to set expectations, the scope of our support is mostly to get our customers started on the right track and to help them in case of issues.

We unfortunately do not provide complete support for customization.

With that in mind, here are a couple of articles to get you started on using a snippet to control the order by sequence:

• http://www.geekality.net/2013/09/26/order-wordpress-rss-feed-by-modified-rather-than-published/
• https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/33545/how-to-reorder-and-display-a-feed-to-be-chronological

Best regards,

Geoff B.

[Tom Stone]

While the content of this reply wasn’t what I hoped for, the nature of the reply matched my question perfectly. Now I know better where to start. 🙂
Thank you Geoff!

(Btw, maybe a widget for Upcoming Events feeds could be a future product? Can’t imagine I’d be the only one interested.)

• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by Tom Stone.

[Geoff B.]

Good morning Johan,

I am glad I was able to give you a useful answer to get you going 🙂

I can totally see how this could be a cool feature to have.

I recommend you suggest it in our User Voice forum. That way other customers can vote for it!

You are welcome back in our support forums any time 🙂

For now, I am going to close this thread.

Have a great week!

Geoff B.

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