Events Calendar Upgrade converts existing events to recurring ones

[Penny]

We’re trying to upgrade a website which has quite old versions of a lot of plugins to the latest versions. After the upgrade it appears that all the pre-existing events have been changed to recurring events. In the Edit Event admin screen, in Event Series, they are shown set to Daily, every 1 day, with an “Add more events” button (rather than just showing a “Schedule multiple events” button), and under “Tickets” there is a warning in red saying “This is a recurring event. If you add tickets they will only show up on the next upcoming event in the recurrence pattern…”

If you then click “Update” to save the event, it generates hundreds of events for successive days. Luckily we are testing this on a copy of the site on a staging server rather than the live site!

This looks like a bug, or are we missing something we need to do after the upgrade?

These are the old and new versions of WordPress and the relevant plugins:-

Wordpress 4.7.7 => 4.8.2
The Events Calendar 3.11.2 => 4.6.4
The Events Calendar PRO 3.11.1 => 4.4.19
WooCommerce 2.4.6 => 3.2.3
The Events Calendar: WooCommerce Tickets 3.11 => Event Tickets 4.6.0 and Event Tickets Plus 4.6.0.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Penny,

Thanks so much for reaching out!

Wow, that is definitely not normal behavior.  It is important to upgrade to the most recent versions of all of your plugins and WordPress version, however I would recommend going slowly.  It sounds like something is happening in the database with the upgrade.  I’d recommend upgrading in this order, after backing up:

• Upgrade all plugins and themes
• Upgrade WordPress core
• Upgrade WooCommerce

Check the result each step to make sure that things are still okay.

Let me know how it goes and if you have any other questions along the way!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Penny]

That’s more or less what we did, except for upgrading WordPress first, and WooCommerce being a plugin we updated that at the same time as the others.

We’ll have to restore the original copy of the site to the staging server and go through the upgrade again in the order you suggest. This may take some time, but this time we’ll monitor when the change to the event occurs.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Sounds good, please let me know how it goes and if you have any other questions in the meantime!

[Penny]

Having restored a copy of the live site to our testing server, the first thing we did was upgrade The Events Calendar 3.11.2 to 4.6.4 and The Events Calendar PRO 3.11.1 to 4.4.19. Immediately afterwards looking at an event with “Edit Event” showed Event Series with Daily selected, and underneath every [1] day.

The tickets section of the event wasn’t displayed because Wootickets had deactivated itself saying it needed the latest version of Events Calendar. We installed and activated Event Tickets 4.6 and Event Tickets Plus 4.6 which then wouldn’t run without upgrading WooCommerce. After upgrading Woocommerce to 3.2.3 the tickets section of the event reappeared (except all the sold tickets now showed as “awaiting review”, but that’s another issue).

We then upgraded the remaining plugins and themes, and WordPress core to 4.8.3.

So it looks pretty conclusive that the conversion of events to be recurring happens when The Events Calendar and The Events Calendar PRO are upgraded.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Penny,

Thank you for providing me with those details.  In other words, were all of your events converted to recurring events upon updating?

At this point, the easiest way to get things up and running, now that everything is up-to-date, is to manually switch events back to their original states.

You may find this extension helpful to assist you in cleaning up these recurring events:

https://theeventscalendar.com/extensions/recurring-event-cleanup-tool/

Please let me know if you have any additional questions about this process, and let me know how it goes!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Penny]

We’ve installed the extension, but in the admin screen the “List of events with recurrences” is empty.

I think at this stage it hasn’t created any extra events. However, when you go to edit the event for some other reason, it displays the Time and Date section as if you’ve already pressed the “Schedule multiple events” button. Also at this point Event Tickets thinks it’s a recurring event and displays the “This is a recurring event…” warning in the tickets section.

If you now edit something unrelated and save the event, it’s then that it starts creating the extra recurrences.
There doesn’t seem to be any way of reversing the phantom “Schedule multiple events” action.
—–
Since writing the above, we’ve noticed the little dustbin at the right hand side of the Event Series section. Clicking that, and then the Update button to save the event seems to clear the problem. It looks like thats a work around – go through all the events immediately after upgrading and do this.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Penny,

I’m glad that you have found a workaround for now.  I can imagine that this can be a lot of extra work, but at least it will result in everything up and running properly!

Let me know if you need any further assistance!

Thanks,

Jaime

[Penny]

As a matter of interest I did a before and after dump of the database when correcting one event, and the most obviously relevant change was this change to wp_postmeta

250993c250989
< INSERT INTO wp_postmeta VALUES (3436450,18073,'_EventRecurrence','a:15:{s:4:\"type\";s:4:\"None\";s:8:\"end-type\";s:5:\"Never\";s:3:\"end\";s:0:\"\";s:9:\"end-count\";s:1:\"1\";s:11:\"custom-type\";s:5:\"Daily\";s:15:\"custom-interval\";s:0:\"\";s:16:\"custom-type-text\";s:0:\"\";s:21:\"occurrence-count-text\";s:6:\"events\";s:19:\"custom-month-number\";s:5:\"First\";s:16:\"custom-month-day\";s:1:\"1\";s:24:\"custom-year-month-number\";s:1:\"1\";s:21:\"custom-year-month-day\";s:1:\"1\";s:22:\"recurrence-description\";s:0:\"\";s:14:\"EventStartDate\";s:19:\"2018-08-22 08:00:00\";s:12:\"EventEndDate\";s:19:\"2018-08-27 12:00:00\";}');
---
> INSERT INTO wp_postmeta VALUES (3436450,18073,'_EventRecurrence','a:3:{s:5:\"rules\";a:0:{}s:10:\"exclusions\";a:0:{}s:11:\"description\";N;}');

Maybe this should have happened as part of the upgrade?

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Penny,

Thank you for providing us with that information.  We have changed the way that recurring data is stored in the database in more recent versions, which is probably why the issue occurred when updating from a very old version to the most recent one.

Glad that things are up and running now, you are welcome back in our support forums any time!

Since you marked the thread as resolved, I am going to close this thread.

Have a great week!

[Author]

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