Duplicate Organizers, Venues, Images, & Other Import Issues

[Beth]

I’d really appreciate a way to easily merge organizers and venues. I’m not sure if the pages I’m importing from are entering their venues differently (blvd. vs. boulevard) or what is happening, but for some they are importing multiple times. In other instances, I had already created organizers for events before I had the ability to import from Facebook and the Facebook events plugin created another entry. Basically, since I started importing from Facebook, I’ve developed a large number of duplicate entries.

I have things like this, for an example:
–Fire Department 91 – Fishers Fire Department Headquarters
–Fishers Fire Department Headquarters
–Hendricks County Humane Society
–Hendricks County Humane Society
–Indianapolis Museum of Art
–Indianapolis Museum of Art
–Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art
–Indianapolis Zoo and White River Gardens
–Indianapolis Zoo
–White River Gardens

In addition, if I choose not to import an event or I delete an imported event, instead of publishing it, I’d love for it to go away. I had my system set to auto import, then set to pending. I was checking before publishing and choose to delete a few that weren’t relevant, but they just import again every time it syncs. I turned off auto importing, so I can pick and choose, but clicking “don’t import” so an event goes away would be nice. A few pages I import from just published their entire 2013 calendar and while I imported 90% of them, the left overs are a lot to wade through each week.

And finally, I’d love to be able to just turn off the image importing. I love importing the images, but I hate that the system is importing the Facebook default image over and over and over again. Since the majority of the pages I import from don’t use an image, I’d just rather turn it off then have hundreds of the default image in my files.

[Barry]

I’m not sure if the pages I’m importing from are entering their venues differently (blvd. vs. boulevard) or what is happening, but for some they are importing multiple times.

That’s possible (variations in address spelling) – the other thing is if Facebook itself believes the venues to be different and assigns a separate ID to them, our plugin is going to roll with that same assumption.

Another consideration is that fuller management of organizers and venues is something our Pro plugin adds – do you also have that running (you don’t need it of course, it just makes it easier to picture your setup)?

[Barry]

In addition, if I choose not to import an event or I delete an imported event, instead of publishing it, I’d love for it to go away.

I see the problem; and I’m not sure that there is a good solution here. I can propose this as a feature – but I’d definitely appreciate your further thoughts on how for instance you’d deal with a scenario where you accidentally delete an event and do wish to re-import it?

My colleague Leah and I were discussing this and thought a viable approach could be to auto-import only events created after the last import took place – does that sound like a strategy that would work for you here? I can’t guarantee it will be implemented, but I can certainly log it as a new feature request.

[Barry]

And finally, I’d love to be able to just turn off the image importing. I love importing the images, but I hate that the system is importing the Facebook default image over and over and over again.

A related problem was reported last month, I think, except in that case the aim was to replace the default Facebook image with something different.

In any event I believe a change was put in place and ought to be available as of the next release which should allow additional control over this sort of thing, albeit it will still be necessary to add a code snippet (ie, to your theme’s functions.php file).

I do think it would be useful to have a facility to turn off image import though, and will log that as a feature request.

[Author]

Posts