Imported Events via Events Aggregator – Timing and Import Conflicts

[Tracy]

Hi,

I’ve got a couple issues with the Events Calendar plugin. First of all, everything on the install is updated to the most recent version, so I don’t believe it’s an issue with that.

Issue 1) Import job doesn’t run on time. We’ve had traffic to the site, but even so, the cron is set to run at 4am, and didn’t run until 11:30am this morning (24 hrs after the first run). It seems as though the time of day set in the options panel isn’t being properly set.

Issue 2) This is maybe a bigger issue. Not all of the events are being imported properly.
– A: Some new events are being missed altogether
– B: Deleted events are not being deleted in The Events Calendar

Details:
– Website URL: http://messiah.e10inc.com/events
– Import Type: Google Calendar Scheduled Imports
– Import frequency: Daily (supposed to run at 4am)
– Calendar for import: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/calendar%40messiahchurchmn.org/public/basic.ics
– Server Info: PHP 7.0.17 with MySQL 5.6.33

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Gina,

Welcome and thanks so much for reaching out!

I’m sorry to hear that you are having issues with Event Aggregator.

A few things to check on to start:

• If you go to Settings < General, make sure that your timezone matches the timezone you have set on your calendar.
• Take a look at the settings you have under Events Settings < Imports.  These setting will dictate how events are handled upon import, in addition to how they are handled when edited/removed/added: <span style=”font-size: 0.875rem;”></span>https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/event-aggregator-import-settings/
• For new events that are missed, check out Import Date Range Limit under Global Import Settings.  By default, only events up to one month in the future will be fetched, but you can alter this setting.

Let me know how it goes!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Tracy]

Thanks for the note, Jaime,

I should have mentioned that I did do these two things, the time zone is accurate and the import setting is 3 months (the events in question are about 1 1/2 months out.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Gina,

Okay, thanks for clarifying that information for me!

Issue 1) Import job doesn’t run on time. We’ve had traffic to the site, but even so, the cron is set to run at 4am, and didn’t run until 11:30am this morning (24 hrs after the first run). It seems as though the time of day set in the options panel isn’t being properly set.

Would you mind taking a screenshot of the “options panel” that you are referring to for me, so that I can try to replicate the setting that you are implementing?

Issue 2) This is maybe a bigger issue. Not all of the events are being imported properly.
– A: Some new events are being missed altogether
– B: Deleted events are not being deleted in The Events Calendar

I tried importing the events with the Google Calendar link that you provided and was able to import all 167 events, is this the case with your imports?

Let me know!

Thanks,

Jaime

[Tracy]

Here’s the screenshot. Looks like it’s still importing at the wrong time of day. I’ve also added a second screenshot showing my import history. Note the times on the imports. Also note the failed import on Nov 11 (this happened after my initial request). I don’t know where to find detail on this, other than it looks like there was a problem.

[Tracy]

Oops. Second file upload didn’t go through. Here it is.

[Tracy]

Ok, regarding the actual events in question. Here they are:

11/15 A Conversation with Carol Erickson
11/16 Grief Coalition Dinner
12/24 Christmas Eve Worship – there were 4 events added here, as well as Sunday School removed & live streaming for 8:45 & 10:30 removed

It seems as though some events are just never added with the automated import, and I’m not sure if any events at all are being properly deleted. Let me know if you have any thoughts.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Thank you for providing me with all of that information.  I have your scheduled import on my test site as well, so that I can run some testing and see how the feed works outside of your site.

As far as scheduled imports go, I also cannot get the scheduled import to work exactly on time either.  This is because of the way that scheduled events are triggered.

To explain: WordPress supports a concept of scheduled events and they can be seen as a sort of regularly occurring background task (a piece of code that, theoretically, runs every 30 mins or at some other interval).

In relation to Event Aggregator, we make use of scheduled events to process imports — however, in the simplest and default case supported by WordPress, they actually are not guaranteed to run at the designated intervals.

If, for example, visitor traffic isn’t fairly constant then they may fail to run (or won’t be triggered often enough to process all the waiting tasks). There’s a pretty good description of this here:

http://www.lucasrolff.com/wordpress/why-wp-cron-sucks

It’s an external link and we don’t necessarily agree with the title of the post, but it does explain things pretty well besides covering a possible solution. Note that many shared web hosts (if that’s what you are using) provide notes in their respective knowledgebases that describes how to set up a ‘real’ cron job in a way that makes sense for their setup, so it could be worth researching that if you want to change how this operates.

 

As far as your events go, I see the events for 11/15 and 11/16, and this is what I see for 12/24:

Is all of this what should be there?

I know this is a lot of information, I just want to make sure everything is clear and that I know exactly what doesn’t seem to be working about your events.

Let me know your thoughts and if you have any other questions along the way!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

 

[Tracy]

Thanks for the reply, Jaime.

I’m aware of how cron jobs work, and the inconsistencies, but we’ve been visiting the site enough that the jobs should at least be running in the morning, not at 5pm.

Unfortunately, do to our launch deadline, we weren’t able to leave the events on the site as they were, so we manually added them.

Finally, the biggest thing I want to address that I haven’t heard from you: Should The Event Calendar (with Event Aggregator) properly delete an event if you delete it from Google Calendar?

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Gotcha, so as you probably know, WP Cron isn’t super reliable, so if you are concerned about your calendar being updated at exactly 4am, you have the option to set up a real cron job instead of using WP Cron.  Your hosting provider should be able to help you with this.

These articles might also be helpful:

• https://tommcfarlin.com/wordpress-cron-jobs/
• https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/wordpress/setup-cron-job.htm

And to answer your question about deleting events, unfortunately at this time if you want to delete something from your events calendar, you will have to do it manually, even if you delete it from your Google Calendar.

You are welcome to vote on this feature request, as we take customer feedback into account when we implement new features:

https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/15047292-option-to-remove-events-not-present-in-a-reimporte

And just to clarify, was I seeing the same results that you were seeing with your imports?

Please let me know if I can answer any other questions for you!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Tracy]

Thanks, Jaime,

We will probably set up a real cron job on the live server. Good to know on event deletion. Seems like a big deal that it isn’t included. I’m going to vote on it now.

Thanks,
Rick

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[Jaime Marchwinski]

Sounds good, thank you for your understanding.  Please let me know if you have any other questions in the meantime!

 

 

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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