Does week view require categorized events?

[Steven W]

I worked with Brian and Andy Fragen much of last week on an issue in Week View, and with their help got that issue resolved. This morning, I logged in to our production site to admire that work and found another very strange issue. When I click on Week View, I get a File Not Found error… But if I enter “sitename/events/week/” or “sitename/events/week/?tribe-bar-date=YYYY-MM-DD” (where the latter is any given date, of course) as a URL, the view works perfectly. (see video here: http://screencast.com/t/ZfxSvBmibN). I noticed that when the error occurs, the URL goes to “sitename/category/uncategorized/week/” … I do have a couple of uncategorized events, but then I had them last week when I wasn’t getting this error. I have upgraded to the current version of both TEC Pro and TEC Category Colors (which I realize you don’t support — but disabling that plugin doesn’t resolve the issue). I’ve cleared all caches (local browser and server-side). I’m really at a loss as to why this is happening all the sudden when it wasn’t happening last week. Any ideas?

[George]

Hey Mark,

I am sorry to hear that more issues have arisen now. This is indeed odd behavior, and it isn’t behavior that I can re-create.

I would recommend temporarily deactivating every single plugin on your site except for The Events Calendar and Events Calendar Pro. This includes deactivating caching and the Category Colors plugin.

1. In this state, how do things behave?

2. What are your site’s Permalinks settings? They can be found, appropriately, in Settings → Permalinks in your wp-admin. For example, are they set to /%postname%/?

Thank you!
George

[Steven W]

Thanks, George. As this is on our semi-production site (currently in maintenance mode before we launch), there are other folks adding content, so I can’t try this right now — but I’ll try this evening when everyone is off and let you know what the results are.

[George]

Thank you! 😀

[Steven W]

OK, here’s what I’ve discovered… We use SiteGround as our hosting provider (been extremely happy with them, by the way). They have a tool called SuperCacher that comes with the service level we subscribe to. It has three levels of caching (I’m not real conversant on all this, so I hope it makes sense to you). Level 1 is a static cache, Level 2 is a dynamic cache, and Level 3 is called “Memcached”. I’ve narrowed it down to some kind of problem with Memcached… If I turn off Memcached, the Week view works — or at least it has worked the five or six times I’ve tested that scenario. If I then turn on Memcached, the Week view still works the first time, most of the time, but if I go somewhere else in the website and then return to the Calendar and select Week view, I get the File Not Found error.

I have a vague understanding of caches, and assume that that first db call (to display the Week view) is cached, but cannot understand why the second call cannot be fetched properly, resulting in the File Not Found error. I understand that you don’t/can’t support someone else’s software, but am compelled to ask if there is any way the TEC code could be a “partner” in this problem. Because I don’t fully understand caching or how it works at a technical level, I’m flying blind here. I’d like to take advantage of the performance improvement Memcached supposedly provides, but obviously can’t do that if it simply results in the error. SiteGround has been very supportive in the past, but I’m fairly sure that without access to the TEC code, this isn’t something they can fix either. Or is it?

Any help or guidance will be appreciated.

[George]

Hey @Mark J,

Thank you so much for investigating all of this and for your reply here. First of all, I’m not surprised to hear praise for SiteGround because I’ve heard many people speak highly of them – I’m glad to hear that they were so helpful, and that you’ve made progress in at least finding out what the source of the problem is here.

I understand that you don’t/can’t support someone else’s software, but am compelled to ask if there is any way the TEC code could be a “partner” in this problem.

The code within The Events Calendar is indeed a big part of this problem. Memcached is a great tool, and we hope for and strive for full compatibility with it.

The issue arises, to the best of my knowledge, because of how The Events Calendar handles calendar features specifically. It uses a “fake” page to allow for pagination into future months, years, etc., and so there is not a real page there – this can cause issues with AJAX, which we’ve improved greatly over time, and also as you see here: Memcached 🙁

I’m sorry about this situation. It is indeed true that our way of doing things is partly to blame, and it is also true that I can make a development ticket for this so that we can improve this over time. However, it is not something that we could fix at all in any short time frame 🙁 I hate to bear that news, but just want to be clear and honest.

I will reach out to our developers and see what we can do about this. Perhaps I am wrong in my assessment. But I don’t think I am, unfortunately.

Please let me know what you think about all of this – we actually have a development meeting today and so I will try to bring this up if we have time; if not, I will slot into the agenda for the next meeting early to make sure we can discuss it 🙂

Sincerely,
George

[Steven W]

Once again, you’ve come through with a thoughtful, honest answer to an issue — and I appreciate it. I kind of understand your explanation, and accept it (though, as you correctly guess, I’d rather not have to 😉 )

Yes, I’d appreciate it if you’d bring it up in your meeting — so that at least this particular use-case gets some visibility.

Curiously, I pinged SiteGround on the issue as well. They allow their employees to log in to a client’s site to troubleshoot, which this fellow did. He couldn’t reproduce the problem… I’m not sure what to make of that, but again, your explanation leaves me thinking that the issue “makes sense” to you from a TEC coding perspective and isn’t just my imagination. As always, I’ll appreciate any progress on this you all can muster.

It’s still one of the best pieces of software I’ve run across in terms of quality of coding, and your support is second to none in my book.

Thanks!

[George]

Mark, I appreciate your kind words about the plugin and about our support even here in the face of disappointing limitations with it. Thank you!

It is indeed interesting that the SiteGround technician was unable to reproduce the problem – weird. However, from what I know about Memcached and our plugins, I do still believe there could be a valid issue here.

I will definitely be the “customer voice” on this and bring it up in our appropriate channels. I am sorry that this will not be a fast-moving thing 🙁 But it will move, that’s for sure.

Thanks so much for the patience and politeness in your replies. I know this doesn’t help much, but shoot us an email at [email protected] – I’d love to hook you up with a coupon code 🙂

Cheers,
George

[Support Droid]

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