iCal Feed not importing from a valid iCal url (WP Engine Hosting)

[santhony]

Hey Guys,

I have been digging around these forums for a while now with no success finding an applicable thread — so I have finally brought myself to create my own ticket.

Here is the situation:
I am entering a valid iCal url and trying to run a recurring import of events. Every time, I get the “Unable to retrieve content from the provided URL” error message. When I navigate that URL directly, I get a .ics file download and it is loaded with events. While I cannot seem to import from this URL into my site, I can import from the file — hence I believe this to be an issue related to a conflict between the plugin and my WP Engine hosting environment.

• I have a pretty fresh installation of wordpress on my WP Engine temp URL — the site is under active development.
• I have deactivated all plugins and tried importing from the url with zero success
• No, I have not reached out to WP Engine yet, as I was hoping for a bit of info to take to them on what rules may need to be excluded. (this being said, they have never made an exception on something they believe to be a security vulnerability)
• Please God tell me there is a workaround for this that you guys have implemented in the past
• I am using the Divi theme which is so wildly popular that if there were issues related to it, someone would have already fixed them — this is not the issue
• I saw one thread related to a similar hosting environment (Web Synthesis) and there was a post at the bottom saying that you guys have resolved the issue there — hoping for similar result here!

Thanks!
Sam

[Brian]

Hi,

Sorry for the issues you are having. I can help troubleshoot them with you.

Do you have the link you are using and can you please provide it in a private reply.

It is hard to see what the issue is without seeing it myself.

Let me know and we can go from here.

Thanks

[santhony]

This reply is private.

[Oliver Whitham]

Hey, I work for WP Engine, just wanted to let you know that you should always feel comfortable reaching out to us! It may be something our team could also fix, or help locate where a conflict may be with a plugin.

[Oliver Whitham]

(I’m not in support by the way so can’t help directly I’m afraid!)

[santhony]

Thanks Oliver. I have an open ticket at WP Engine as well.

[Brian]

Thanks Oliver for your note here.

I was able to duplicate the problem on another hosting so I do not believe it is WP-Engine related.

I will be doing more tests tomorrow to see about getting to the bottom of this.

Thanks

[Brian]

Hi,

So it looks to be a couple issues at play here.

First the ics file starts with events from 2015 and in fact more then half the events there are past events. So it has to process all those events first before even getting to upcoming events.

Second part of that, is the file (and link) has a large amount of events and the script is not able to process them all. Since it starts at the beginning of the file it times out before it even gets to 2016 and produces the error you are getting.

Even after reducing the file to 2016 on my end I get a malformed response error and the script times out.

For sure there has to be a way for us to better parse the ics feed, but that is not something we can improve right away.

But, I was able to split the 2016 events into two files and then able to see all the events imported.

I have included links to the files I created in the private reply below.

Let me know if those work for you.

Thanks

[Brian]

This reply is private.

[santhony]

Hey Brian,

I have zero problems when importing the entire file. It takes about 2-3 seconds and then displays all events from the starting date that I set (316 items to be exact with today as the start date). Importing the file has never failed or given me an error.

The problem is that it doesn’t work from the URL — it only works when I use a file.

In my initial post here, I said that the file works, just not the URL.

I am not sure where we got off track here and started investigating something that was not the issue.

What are the next steps for figuring out the URL issue?

— Sam

[Brian]

Oh guess the lead got buried then.

I checked and the url validated as an ics so it should work, but I am not sure why it is not.

It could be that it is too large of a file to bring in and parse. Are you able to reduce the amount of events and see if that can at least rule out that or find out it is the issue.

Thanks

[santhony]

Brian,

I have requested a different URL to a feed for only the next 10 – 15 days to test and see if that resolves the issue.

I guess the issue I have is that nowhere do you guys say anything about a limit on the number of events being imported. 316 just doesn’t seem like all that much especially considering they import from the file just fine. Has nobody ever used this to import a couple hundred events before? Was that not part of the testing for the plugin?

In my opinion, the number of events just can’t be the issue. I am requesting the smaller feed just to rule it out.

— Sam

[santhony]

Ok, not sure how I have not tried this yet, but I just imported from this .ics url and it worked as it should: http://www.southendzone.com/ical/packers.ics

So we now know it is something to do with the feed being imported.

Couple questions:

Do you have an idea of how many events can be imported from a URL?

Let’s say I do import a calendar, and then it re-imports in a week — will events be overwritten with new information like if the location changed in the ics import, will my website calendar get that new info?

Thanks,
Sam

[Brian]

For sure we do testing, but the limit of events is a moving target.

And we only control 1 part of the equation, our coding. If the server a site has low amount of resources to run the script to parse the feed it will reduce the amount, same if the server the ical feed is generated on has a low amount of resource it will reduce the number more.

So we do not provide a number because it depends on factors out of our control.

Of course we can improve the importer to handle more events as we get feedback from people such as yourself about what you are trying to do, but that is not something that can help today.

So unfortunately, I do not have a exact answer for importing, however, your site can import the iCal file so that leaves our coding and the source of the iCal feed as the sources for this. One thing to try could be to increase the php timeout time and see if that gives the script enough time to parse the feed. Another is to see about getting a feed with only future events.

If it does turn out to be our coding and there is nothing we can do about it we do offer a 30 day refund policy:

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/refund-policy/

Let’s say I do import a calendar, and then it re-imports in a week — will events be overwritten with new information like if the location changed in the ics import, will my website calendar get that new info?

If you setup a recurring import it will modify the existing events in WordPress with new information.

It will not do this if you do One Time Imports.

Let me know what you find out.

Thanks

[santhony]

Hey Guys,

I got access to the area where the iCal feed is created and was able to slice it up into smaller, individual category feeds. Everything appears to be working.

Thanks for all your time.

Marking this as resolved.

— Sam

[Author]

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