Events Calendar with Facebook Events Add-on

[Justin]

I’ve used The Events Calendar before and really like how it works and how easily customizable it is. But for a new project I’m wanting to just create events in Facebook and have them pulled into the website from there. So they only have to be created once and prevents data entry errors, etc.

My question on this Add-on is how well it keeps things synced? Lets say you create an event on Facebook and import it into the website today. Then Tomorrow you change the start time of that event from 3PM to 5PM, then run the importer again. Will it update the already existing event on the website to the new time?

[Andras]

Hello Justin and thanks for reaching out!

Yes, the Facebook importer should satisfy your needs. You can set up scheduled imports as well, so you don’t need to click import every time you refresh an event. In can be done automatically depending on your need.

I would also like to draw your attention to Event Aggregator, which gives you more than just importing from Facebook. You can find out all about it here: https://theeventscalendar.com/product/event-aggregator/

We don’t provide free trials, so if you want to test our plugins you will need to buy them. However, if you are unsatisfied, you can ask for a refund within 30 days of your purchase. More on that here: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/refund-policy/

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers,
Andras

[Justin]

That all sounds great! Two follow up question.

1) Assuming an event has already been imported into the website from Facebook a few days ago. Then that event is completely deleted (not a change of date or time), would the website know to sync that or is this more of an import than a sync?

2) After talking the client more, they would not be putting all of their events on Facebook. There would be times when they would want to add a “Private Event” to the calendar on their website only so people know they aren’t available for a private catering, but wouldn’t want that on Facebook because it wouldn’t make sense.

So I know they could just enter those manually via the WordPress Backend, but just wanted to be sure those would be completely independant from the auto importer. For example if they had two events (one facebook, one manual) that overlapped in a time by 30 mins, would they still be independant and the import wouldn’t overwrite or update anything of the manually entered event?

I’m assuming based on my original question yesterday, the only way a new import would update an event on the website from Facebook is if it had the same event ID.

Thanks again for your help!

[Andras]

Hello again Justin,

1. At the moment it is importing and updating. Events deleted from Facebook will not be deleted from your Events Calendar.

2. At the moment there is no option to push events from your calendar to Facebook. So I think you are safe there. 🙂 The events which you put in your Events Calendar will not make it to Facebook automatically. And that event will not be overwritten by any import. (Imported events are marked in a way, manually added events are not.)

Also, the event ID of a Facebook event will be highly likely be only a meta field in WordPress. That will not be used in WordPress as the ID of the event.

Does this clarify?

Andras

 

[Justin]

András, appreciate the detail in your post!

1. So the only limit here is if you delete an event on FB, there is just one extra step of going into WordPress Dashboard and manually deleting the event. But all new events added to FB would be automatic pulled into the website.

I recently did a custom sync from a 3rd party API to your calendar for another project. Manually building the event $data array and calling Tribe__Events__API::createEvent($data);. It’s not as fancy as yours because instead of updating existing events, I just delete all the events and then reimport everything from the third party. So even though I have the delete feature I was looking for, I do understand the complexity in syncing and the give and take here. Although, I do think it would be a cool feature to add in the future. A full 2-way sync.

2. This sounds perfect. I wasn’t worried about events going from Website to Facebook, just didn’t want a Facebook Event to somehow update/delete an event on the website. Based on what you are saying this is impossible.

My client doesn’t have a lot to invest in the website, but hopefully even with my more expensive bid, I’ll get the job by offering them a better product, thanks to The Events Calendar (the most important part of the project for them).

Thanks again for your time.

Justin

[Justin]

Checked the wrong thing here on the last post. My “issue” is resolved. Thanks again.

[Andras]

Hey Justin,

1. Yes, you would require the extra step of deleting the event on the site. The rest should be all automatic.

You have a great solution there with deleting all and re-importing. This should work absolutely fine if you only have a limited number of events.

Unfortunately this would not be a good solution for a full 2-way sync as we have users who are importing hundreds of events on a daily / weekly basis (some even have 1000+) and doing a full delete and import there would be too resource intensive.

To be able to do an effective 2-way sync it would be needed then when events are deleted from Facebook then they would still be visible at least to our importer marked with a ‘deleted’ tag or something. Otherwise it is difficult to process the data.

Thanks again for reaching out and sharing your solution.

I am going to close this ticket, but if you need anything else related to this topic or another please post a new topic in the forum and we will help you out.

Good luck with your project!

Cheers,
Andras

PS: If you like our plugin, and you didn’t yet do so 🙂 we would be happy to receive a review in the wordpress.org repository. Thanks!
https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/the-events-calendar

PS2: We’d be also grateful if you would give us feedback on your satisfaction with support. Just click on one of the classy looking emojis below. 🙂 If you can spare a few words, that’s even better. Doublethanks!

 

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