Events Import (recurring)

[center4aging]

Thanx Jamie.

The first thing for me is to define ALL allowable values to define a pattern. For example what values are needed in what fields to import so an event can be created:
– starting date of 12/18/2017
– end date of 06/30/2018
– repeats every second and third Fridays of the month
– exception dates of blah, blah, & blah.

Reformatting, you are saying, will get me those allowable possible values – cool.
Tak

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Yup, it sounds like you are on the right track!  I hope you can achieve the results that you are looking for!

[center4aging]

Hi Jamie,

Happy holidays!

Couldn’t understand the working so put aside the project to use WP All Imports with Event Calendar Pro Import for now.

I ended up manually configuring recurring events after the initial import by Event Calendar. I have to say that the options presented by the UI is very robust, easy to understand and was able to handle different recurring settings/patterns which is impressive. Result is initially imported about 350 events and after a two day marathon on configuring the recurring events, the events are up to 7900 (1/1/2018 – 12/31/2018 for the most part).

My two yens – I mean cents: Part of the two day marathon configuration was waiting. Early on I found out that although the page says I can move away from the page while the events are created/updated, there were occasions that it wasn’t the case. So I made sure to wait until it completed. For weekly recurring that meant upwards of 52 new events. Not slow as molasses but even then for the server to update ~320 events and cumulatively the process adds up in our case.

Going forward monthly new recurring events will be an average of ~40 so the “import & manual update process” is still not a trivial thing (I use “not trivial” in the sense of “time” it takes to accomplish this task monthly; again robust interface/options helps). If future functionality of “import” is given super powers to take all possible recurring patterns as it currently exists in the UI, it will be nirvana 😉

Thanx for all the communication on this topic. At the end we couldn’t automate the recurring, even with the use of a third party plugin, but when all said & done we launched the website this morning so chalk up another production site using your Event calendar related products 😉 This site is huge as 8 different cities are collaborating to bring one stop information consumption (aggregated but searchable) in one location!

With gratitude,
Tak

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Tak,

Happy New Year!

I’m sorry that things did not work out exactly as you had hoped that they would, but it sounds like things are up and running, which is great!

Thank you so much for your feedback throughout this process.  Please feel free to add any of your ideas to our Feature Requests, as we tend to implement ideas based on customer feedback, so your input is greatly appreciated:

https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas

You are welcome back in our support forums any time!

Since it seems that the work has been completed, I am going to close this thread.

Should anything else come up in the future, please feel free to open up a new thread.

Have a great week!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

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