Facebook import and Community Events

[phil]

I would like to be able to assign Facebook imported events to a community to user. There are two scenarios.

1. I have a user, say Biker Girl, and she has a Facebook page “Biker Girl”. Can I arrange for Facebook events from the Biker Girl Page to be imported to and owned by the Biker Girl user? I don’t want her to be an admin. Can she run the import herself, or can I run it and arrange for the imported events to be owned by her?
2. Biker Girl is not a user of site. I import the Biker Girl events from Facebook myself. Biker Girl subsequently creates an account on site. I would now like to transfer ownership of the existing Biker Girl Events to her, and to have all future imports be assigned to her account. Is this possible?

Thanks for your help.

[phil]

That should say “…is not a user of my site…subsequently creates an account on my site…

[George]

Hey Phil,

Thanks for reaching out. Just to clarify things here, when you talk about having an imported event “assigned to her”, do you mean that this “Biker Girl” account is set as the author of the event on your WP site?

If so, then there are unfortunately not any default or out-of-the-box ways to do this with either of our plugins 🙁

As for your question here:

I don’t want her to be an admin. Can she run the import herself, or can I run it and arrange for the imported events to be owned by her?

At this time, only admins can run imports.

Let me know what you think about all this.

Thank you!
George

[phil]

Hi George,

Thanks for the reply. The scenario is that I’m initially going to be setting up a WP site and importing a lot of events from a lot of different Facebook pages. The owners of those pages won’t have an account on my WP site. They won’t even know it exists at first. I’ll tell them, of course, and they might want to create an account on my WP site to take control of their own events, both those that are already on the site and the new ones which will appear every time the import is run.

When I say “take control” I think I do mean be set as the author. Basically, I want them to be able to modify or even delete their events on my WP site. I want the events to appear as though the Facebook page owner had added them herself to my WP site from her own account.

I want her to have complete control over her own events, but not have access to anyone else’s events, nor access to the admin functions of the WP site.

Thanks for your help.

[phil]

Just to add that this seems to be a request for similar functionality.

[George]

Hey Phil,

Thanks for clarifying things a bit, I think the essence of your goals are summarized nicely by what you said here:

I want her to have complete control over her own events, but not have access to anyone else’s events, nor access to the admin functions of the WP site.

This is unfortunately a tricky thing to do. First off, it’s not something dictated by any of our plugins; there are no settings within The Events Calendar or any of its add-ons that would enable this functionality. It is a general WordPress question/thing.

You can definitely allow users to sign up for accounts on your site; as for limiting their access from there, you can set their accounts to certain “user roles” like “Editor” or “Author”, but not “Admin”. This will let them edit some content like events, but not change admin settings, access the Plugins or Themes page, etc.

But as for letting them only access their own events, that is unfortunately not possible with WordPress core at this time. The only things you could do are use custom coding to wire up some custom system for this; or maybe there is a plugin out there that does something similar to what you want. I unfortunately do not know of such a plugin, but it’s possible – there are a ton of plugins out there! 🙂

I’m sorry for some of the disappointing news in my reply here, but hope it is helpful nonetheless. Let me know what you think!

— George

[phil]

Hi George,

Thanks for the update. I think I’ve probably not explained myself well! I think all I’m really asking for is to have the Facebook importer automatically change the Author of events once the are imported.

Suppose I set up the Community User BikerGirl with the WP role of Author.

Now I run the import and all of the imported events have me as the author. Next I change the author of one of those events to be BikerGirl. At that point, she can do whatever she pleases to the event for which I made her the author, but cannot modify anyone else’s events.

That’s pretty much all I’m looking for. I want all of the events imported from the BikerGirl FB paged to have their author set to the WP user BikerGrirl. And the same for all of the other users who have an associated FB page.

If I’ve got the above right, then perhaps a very simple way of building this into the Facebook importer would be to allow each FB event source to be associated with an author on the input form. Once the import finishes the plugin would simply change the author of the imported events to that specified on the input form. This image is the kind of thing I’m thinking of.

The aim of all this just to able to say to Biker Girl, “Hey look, I’ve set up this cool site with a calendar of events, and I’ve included some of your events. If you’d like to take control of them, I’ll set you up with a user-id and you can modify them however you like.”.

What do you think?

[George]

Hey Phil,

Thanks for elaborating on things and for your patience with me here! To me, there seem to be separate questions. First is this one, as you highlighted:

I think all I’m really asking for is to have the Facebook importer automatically change the Author of events once the are imported.

Okay – if this is the case, then unfortunately the answer for this is that it would still require some custom coding to auto-change the author upon import 🙁

But next, you go on to specify the functionality of this a bit more as follows:

Now I run the import and all of the imported events have me as the author. Next I change the author of one of those events to be BikerGirl. At that point, she can do whatever she pleases to the event for which I made her the author, but cannot modify anyone else’s events.

Keep in mind the first question which I highlighted above in this post; that if this was just a matter of setting a custom author upon import, it’s still a custom coding project.

But then in addition to changing the author, you specify here how the permissions for the author should work like this: “she can do whatever she pleases to the event for which I made her the author, but cannot modify anyone else’s events”. Unfortunately, even if you did get the author reassignment feature working, it would not enable this specific feature of only letting the author work on her own events, but nobody else’s. The closest thing to that is the “Contributor” user role, but then this User Role itself doesn’t allow full editing access….

So there are some inherent issues here that are both with our plugins and with WordPress itself, and getting around them would require custom development.

Finally, you mention this as an example of your goal:

“Hey look, I’ve set up this cool site with a calendar of events, and I’ve included some of your events. If you’d like to take control of them, I’ll set you up with a user-id and you can modify them however you like.”.

I want to be clear that you can, indeed, manually do this. Access control and the user system on your site are all general WordPress things, and are not parts of The Events Calendar or Facebook Importer. But wiring up some automatic way for all of this to work is unfortunately not native to The Events Calendar/FB Importer OR WordPress itself, so it would unfortunately require custom development.

I hope all of this information helps!

— George

[Support Droid]

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[Author]

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