Event Calendar Pro breaks widgets back end

[els76uk]

Yes, I rolled back with a backup. I no longer need to import from backup, as we decided to type them all again and have now nearly finished, but that was with the new site.

Now it’s the old site which is causing problems – as I say, I can’t update http://www.discodamaged.net to 3.5 without breaking the widgets 🙁

[els76uk]

Now my new site is broken. I can’t get to the widgets again. Just like last time. When I deactivate Events Cal Pro, everything’s fine again.

Seriously, guys, your plugin is breaking my site. I’ve wasted hours of time trying to fix it, re-entering appointments, and we’re no closer to getting to the bottom of it than we were right at the beginning of my messaging over two weeks ago.

Unless you can fix this quickly (and I’m not holding my breath), I’m going to have to give up on your plugin, and install some other calendar program which works. Hopefully I’ll be able to import the events and venues I’ve spent so many hours on.

This is really a very bad situation, not helped by the fact that you take SO LONG to reply to each of my forum posts.

[els76uk]

To top it, I can’t export an events XML file because every time I do, the response is “page not found.” I can export anything else. Seriously, what can have gone on to cause such trouble? And can you help me fix it?

[els76uk]

This reply is private.

[Rob]

Hey els76uk! Rob from Modern Tribe here; I head up the Community team, and Barry brought this thread to my attention today since it’s clear you’re frustrated and I wanted to follow-up to see if I can help get this relationship back on track.

Right off the bat let me apologize for the poor experience you’ve faced here. While I still think it’s worth noting that this is something we’re actively trying to nail down – we’ve had a few threads that appeared related, but the users never followed-up with us to get the additional information we requested – I can understand you’d be disappointed that it has yet to reach a resolution. Please know that we want to patch all bugs in the codebase, and if we can get to the point where we’re positive this is one and can recreate it, we’ll get it logged ASAP. To that end your help in getting us to this point is greatly appreciated.

On the same end, there are a few things I’d appreciate you keeping in mind:

• Most significantly: we want to get this sorted for you. We do think there might be something in our codebase at fault here, and want to find out what that is and how it can be fixed – if not via a snippet, then definitely in a forthcoming release. Barry and I talked and he’s going to keep working with you at this to get what we need from you and to rope in one of our other core devs as needed.
• We do our best to get all bugs fixed, but also do have limits to how much support we can provide per user per day. Generally our limit is one round of replies per threads per 24 hour period; though we try to be pretty clear about this and that we make no claims to turn replies around quicker, it seems we failed you on that end. While we are currently training some new folks onto the team so there are more bodies at work on the forum, realistically I can’t see us guaranteeing anything quicker than 24-hours unless we were to start charging substantially more for the licenses.
• I’m not sure that it’s really fair to say we’re “no closer to getting to the bottom of it than we were right at the beginning of my messaging over two weeks ago”; I just spent the past few minutes reviewing the 2 pages of this forum thread, and it’s clear there has been progress made as we’ve continued to narrow down the scope of this issue. It’s clear to me that Barry is doing his best to get you sorted on a tricky issue that we can’t recreate and need more specifics in order to try and diagnose. I apologize if it isn’t coming across the same to you, and welcome feedback and your thoughts on how we could improve our messaging to better convey this.
• While we’re not necessarily keeping track of reply counts per customer, I will say that this thread has gone on substantially longer than most we encounter here on the forum. While we’re doing our best to get you replies in as timely a fashion as possible I want to also set expectations that we do have finite support resources which need to be evenly distributed between all our users.

All that said: totally understandable if you are tired of waiting and would rather take your business elsewhere to a plugin shop with code and a support system that better meets your needs. If you’d like a full refund please just email [email protected] referencing this thread and we’ll get that processed for you. While it’d suck to lose you as a customer – especially since, as I noted above, we’re committed to getting this sorted so other users in your same boat can rest easy.

Thanks for your patience and support so far.

[els76uk]

Hey Rob, thanks for your long reply, it’s appreciated. Please understand that I want to get this fixed, because I’ve invested a lot more in your product so far than the $60 or whatever or cost to buy. I work on this project in my spare time, and have spent every evening and weekend for two weeks entering data, only to see it effectively gone in a puff of code. And it’s currently so broken that I couldn’t export the data to another calendar program, even if it were compatible, which is unlikely out of the box. I don’t care about a refund – I care about getting the calendar on my site working.

Please could you tell me where we’re up to now. I’ve offered you as much information as I possibly can – installing the debug mode broke my site even further, but there’s a lot of useful info in the error_log I posted in a private message, but I don’t know if anyone looked at that on Monday? I’ve also offered you admin logins for my site, and also made it clear that the site’s not live to the public, so you’re welcome to do anything you wish, including changing the theme.

I look forward to your reply and hopefully getting this fixed!

[Barry]

Thanks for bearing with us, first of all.

Now my new site is broken. I can’t get to the widgets again. Just like last time. When I deactivate Events Cal Pro, everything’s fine again.

Is this still the case? If so, can you additionally share (S)FTP details and confirm the login credentials you supplied previously are valid on this site / supply new credentials?

Do note that we would need to do some “tinkering” so there would be some amount of disruption – and, without wanting to sound alarmist, nor can we take any responsibility for problems that might follow on from this – and so we’d recommend making a complete backup of your site (and, as ever, ensuring you know how to restore it).

Let us know!

[ranchhousedesigns]

I can also confirm this. I have a site that has over 2000 events, with many of them created because of reoccurring events. My client just contacted me today asking about why they weren’t showing up in the sidebar. I checked the widgets and the backend was broken (looking at the source, the code stops in the countdown widget).

When I disable the pro plugin, everything is working. If you want I can create a staging environment for you to take a look.

[els76uk]

Thanks Ranchhousedesigns – I’m really pleased it’s not just me!

[els76uk]

This reply is private.

[els76uk]

This reply is private.

[els76uk]

Thanks Barry – yes, it’s still happening. My colleague has finished crying, just.

I shared a login and FTP details with you via private reply. Good luck.

[Barry]

Thanks again for your patience.

In the short term I’ve added a temporary fix: if you view your list of plugins you will see one entitled Temporary Tribe/Events Countdown Widget Fix and it is currently active – all this plugin does is “kill” the Events Countdown widget and that should allow you to administer your widgets with the obvious exception of the Events Countdown widget itself.

For anyone else coming across this, you can implement the same fix by adding the following line of code to your theme’s functions.php file:

remove_action( 'widgets_init', 'tribe_countdown_register_widget' );

I don’t think this is strictly speaking a problem with the Events Countdown widget: the problem is rather that it is trying to load a list of all events on the system and in your case you in excess of 26,000 events – this is “crashing” the system. It looks like many of those events shouldn’t be there as there are huge numbers of recurring events taking place on the same day, so something has clearly gone wrong there – and of course you noted something along these lines previously:

<p style=”text-align: left;”>There were around 3,000 events, but that turned into 170,000 or so when imported. I also started getting a lot of bugs from the debug menu when imported, with pages not loading correctly.</p>

With that in mind:

• Once this is resolved and the duplicates are removed you can deactivate and ultimately delete the temporary fix from your list of plugins (similarly, for anyone else, you can remove the extra line of code from your theme’s functions.php file if you have added it)
• The real problem is the huge number of duplicates and cleaning that up is likely to be the key to a solution here

In your case (els76uk), how many ‘real’ events are there? Would you be able to clean things up fairly quickly by trashing those duplicates? Remember also we do now have this snippet available so if you can revert to an earlier backup from before the duplicates were generated then apply that snippet, you should be able to import data without this happening.

@ranchhousedesigns: this sounds like it may be effectively the same problem in your case. Can you test out the fix and/or look at cleaning up any duplicates and see if that resolves this?

Our apologies to all affected for the inconvenience.

[ranchhousedesigns]

I added the action to the functions file, and it did solve the issue. I can now access my widgets screen.

I checked my events and I found that the client put 2 events with no end date. All of the other events have end dates, so they aren’t an issue, but the events without end dates have been duplicated many times over. I tried to edit the event to add an end date (dropped it to 4 occurrences) but it didn’t remove any posts. It looks like I’ll just have to manually remove them.

I have a feeling it may have been caused by the host they are on. I’ve noticed recently that their server keeps cutting out, and if this happened during a save, I could easily see it corrupting the reoccurring event.

[els76uk]

Thanks Rob, but that’s not fixed the issue for me. I still can’t access the widgets. I can see the plugin you added, and it’s activated, but the widgets are still not there.

To answer your question, there are perhaps a couple of hundred events, and they virtually all recur.

[Author]

Posts