Import w/o Venues?

[Joe]

Hi,

I’m trying to do a test import of a CSV with event information. I just noticed that there is no handling for actual address fields. Is this right? Is there no way to import events without first adding the venues? In our use case the locations are up in the air and the venues are not known.

Is there a way to support address fields and not specific venues?

Thanks!

[Brook]

Howdy Joe,

That is correct. In order for an event to have an address it must have a venue. However, you can mass import venues as CSVs. If you wish to import an event without an  address for now, that is also possible. Just leave the venue field blank, then come back and add it later once it does have an address.

If you need further support checkout WordPress.org: The Events Calendar. That forums is where we and a community of volunteers provide free support for the basic plugin. This forum is for pre-sales questions only.

Cheers!

– Brook

[Joe]

Well I guess this rules out using this plugin for us.

Is it that difficult to have the ability to add/import the location for each event? We may have hundreds of venues and they can change every few months (community meetups).

We have all of our content ready to be imported we just need to pick a good plugin before we make the system final. I’m really surprised that you require a venue, thats really putting the cart before the horse for smaller events.

Thanks for your help.

[Brook]

 

Thanks for the feedback Joe. It seems to like you are picturing venues to be more complex than they are in our plugin. A venue is an address. All fields are optional for a venue. It can have a phone number or an email, but it does not need one. Even all of the address fields are optional, so if you only know the city of the venue or the state, that’s fine too. A venue does not even require a true name, but it helps to give it one. Commonly the name of the venue is the street address of that venue, and with a CSV import it is easy to just import the street address as both the name and street address fields.

In your case it sounds like you have a lot of venues with no address. That’s no problem, import them with the venue field blank. If they do have a street address, were I you I would copy the address column(s) of your CSV into a new venue CSV. Then import that as a venue CSV. Make the venue name the street address as well as the actual address by duplicating it in your CSV. Then when you go to import your events and it asks you which field is the venue name, say the street address field is the venue name. For rows with no street address, it will import without a venue attached and thus be an addressless event. For rows with a street address, it will find your venue that you just imported. And that’s it!

Does that all make sense? Do you still foresee a problem? In my mind a venue is an address, and that’s how our plugin designed as well. To date I have never seen any feedback that this complicates things from people who have used it.

Cheers!

– Brook

[Joe]

OK maybe I am thinking about this the wrong way.

We have a CSV with columns for event details, and also several columns for location fields. So each row is an event and we want to import it as one file and not a separate import for venues and events.

We will always have an actual address for the venue, but it is in the same record as the event.

Does this make sense now?

[Brook]

For sure that makes sense. I assume you are using a spreadsheet program to manage this data, then export as a CSV. If you copy/paste the location information to a new sheet, then export that as a new CSV, you now have the venue CSV ready! Follows these steps:

1. Go to CSV Import > Venue, select your venue CSV
2. When importing a CSV it asks you to match up the columns of your CSV with fields in our plugin. Select the venue street address from your CSV as both the name and address of the venue
3. Import your unaltered Events CSV that you already made. When it asks you for the venue name, set that as the street address.

You’re done!

– Brook

[Joe]

No, its the same spreadsheet. An event is a row, there are columns for every atomic piece of the address.

[Brook]

Awesome! That’s what I expected. I might not have been clear before, but I was saying you should copy the location columns to a new spreadsheet. That will be your venue spreadsheet. You do not even need to remove those columns from the original event spreadsheet, as when you go to import the events it will allow you to select which columns you wish to import. Simply do not select the venue location columns, since those will be in the separate venue spreadsheet you just imported. Just set the venue name to the street address, and it will cross reference everything.

This might make more sense once you give it a whirl. The CSV importer is part of our free plugin The Events Calendar as well, so download that and you can try it out. Cheers!

– Brook

[Joe]

I tried the import first before I asked the question. I saw there were no fields in the events table for atomic address items.

I’m not trying to be a pain here, but we’re not going to maintain a separate table for the venues. It is set per event and that seems to be a reasonable way of using the plugin.

What we definitely don’t want to happen is to somehow get the events and venues out of sync, and importing them in two parts would lead to that.

More importantly, we’re manually scouring this data and putting it into Google Sheets but we could just do it as a Google Calendar which many other plugins support. Is that planned?

I am trying to make sure my admins will not make data entry mistakes. I don’t want to do some mini normalization here just because it will look nicer in the DB. Get my drift?

Ideally this could be a checkbox on import that allows for the mapping between fields from both areas. And speaking of which, if my column headers are a match for the name of the field, can you not prompt me to manually map (or at least prefill it out).

Thanks, I hope some of this feedback is useful. I’d love to use the product.

[Brook]

Thank for elaboratin Joe. It just occurred to me that you will not even need two separate spreadsheets. It could be the same one imported twice. First import it as a venue set, and select the venue columns. Then a second time as an event set. There would be zero risk of it getting out of sync.

But if you don’t wish to do that I understand. I truly hope you can find a different solution, but sadly without building something from the ground up I doubt you will ever find something tailored 100% to your needs. You sometimes need to go that last 2 or 3%.

I appreciate the feedback, and I mean it. I will keep it in mind and see if anyone else in the future mentions wanting something similar. To date I have never seen anyone else with a similar request. It is quite unique to not regularly reuse venues. And if you are reusing even some, the current setup works best for a variety of reasons. If you would like to take this feedback to the next level, please officially suggest this as a feature on our<span class=”Apple-converted-space”> </span>feature suggestion page. From there we can monitor it to see if other folks are voting it up and interested.

Thanks again. I hope you find a solution, either with our plugin or otherwise. I wish I knew of an alternate to recommend, but I have not seen anything close. Cheers!

– Brook

[Joe]

OK, importing the same file twice is not as much of a concern.

Thanks for the help!

[Brook]

I am very happy to hear it. Thanks for letting us know!

– Brook

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