Importing Google Calendar events with locations to appear on events map

[Mike]

My client has 4 Google calendar’s which I’m importing events for. All events have a location and I need that location to appear on the calendar Map View. All the events imported properly and new venues were created, but the events aren’t appearing on the Calendar Map view after importing.

When I edited the imported venue, the location has been saved as a title, but the actual address wasn’t entered into the respective fields. When I manually updated the location (based on the title) the event appeared on the map.

How can i get the location to properly import so it can be shown on the Map View?

[Patricia]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for contacting us!

The Events Calendar has a built-in feature that checks for broken venue data and will correct it for you. If you head over to Events → Settings, there is a section called Map Settings and a button that says “Fix venues data.” Please click that, refresh your Map View and see if that makes a difference.

If the issue persists, you can also add a Google Maps API Key to help avoid timeouts and API error messages. You will find more information in the following articles:

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/troubleshooting-map-view/

Creating a Google Maps API Key

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any other questions and I’ll be happy to assist!

Regards,

Patricia

[Mike]

I don’t see that button. Is it under Settings > General?

[Patricia]

Hi Mike,

You should be able to see the button under Events → Settings in the Map Settings section, but it will be available only if the plugin actually detects that there is a broken venue in your calendar. I’m afraid it is not possible to import the venues from Google calendar in a way that the “Where” field gets cut up and all information is included in the correct venue fields in Events Calendar as expected.

If this is something you want to see implemented in future releases, I would recommend casting a vote in our Feature Ideas forum to let us know.

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

I’m sorry for not being able to assist you on this!

Let me know if you need anything else.

Best Regards,

Patricia

[Mike]

I’ve got to tell you Patricia, I’ve been having quite the horrible time with The Events Calendar. It seems that everything I need it to do, it can’t.

I need to customize the look of the google map and its popups, and import 4 Google Calendar’s events to display on the map.

I’ve spent an additional $800 on a developer to customize the map. In the process, we discover you don’t offer a method to override the javascript which is used to generate the map styling and info windows. So my developer has to break the ability to auto-update the plugin. Now I have a plugin that matches my clients branding, but can never be updated.

Now I’m told that you don’t support geolocating events from .ics files that have location info. So basically you advertise that you can import .ics files from Google Calender, charge me extra for that option, and don’t actually support importing all the fields.

The final nail in the coffin is that I’m now told to vote for an import function that actually imports properly. Maybe it’ll get implemented, maybe it won’t.

You advertise a product that’s “Fully extensible to meet your needs” with “Flexible customization options” and “Legendary user support“.

I don’t see it. I’m a customer that hired a professional to extend and customize your PRO product, yet haven’t been able to do so because your legendary user support consists of:

“Unfortunately, this kind of request isn’t a built in option, and would require some customization that we can’t provide on these forums”

“Unfortunately, there is no built in way to make an override of the javascript files.”

“Sadly, I don’t see anything specific about this as a customization in our Extensions library”

“I’m sorry for not being able to assist you on this!”

When I take a look at your forums, I see dozens of posts like this. “Sorry, that’s out of scope” “Sorry we can’t help you”. Your team needs to take a good hard look at the “support” you’re providing, because right now, it’s comically bad.

Stop passing the buck. Give customers actual solutions to problems, even if it means writing the damn code for their functions.php file. That library of solutions would actually demonstrate “Legendary User Support”.

If your team would like to talk about my real-world experience with your product, you’ve got my email, I’d love to give you a post mortem.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by Mike.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by Mike.

[Barry]

Hi Mike,

I’m sorry that you’ve been disappointed by your interactions with the team and our products.

We work hard to provide the best support experience we can and we aim to couple that with clean, extensible code. We’re not perfect of course: mistakes can happen and I’d agree there are parts of our plugins that are not quite as customizable as may be ideal or where other improvements ought to be made.

With that said, I strongly disagree with your assertion that our support is “comically bad” and I’m unsure quite how we can be said to be “passing the buck”: we’re upfront in both our terms and conditions and in numerous open interactions with you and other users in the forums that there is a reasonable limit to the degree of assistance we can provide when it comes to custom development tasks.

If I can take a moment to address a couple of specific items you’ve raised:

So basically you advertise that you can import .ics files from Google Calender, charge me extra for that option, and don’t actually support importing all the fields.

The field containing the event location is imported, but it’s a facet of the iCal standard that the data is delivered as a single piece of text, rather than logical components such as street, city and country fields etc.

Certainly it would be possible to make some best guesses and break it apart, but doing this in a way that makes sense for and works well with the vast range of possible permutations that our customers use is not without its challenges.

In the process, we discover you don’t offer a method to override the javascript which is used to generate the map styling and info windows.

As Victor noted in a previous exchange, you can dequeue and replace any Javascript such as this. That arguably is not the perfect method – depending on the extent of the adjustments you needed to make – but I struggle to imagine a scenario where you or your developer would have no option but to hack core plugin code.

If I’m wrong and there are solid reasons as to why your dev needed to do that then of course we want to hear more: if you can share your developer’s feedback, that would be awesome.

Give customers actual solutions to problems, even if it means writing the damn code for their functions.php file.

We provide customers with working solutions every day. We also say “no” every day, multiple times, because that too can be the correct course of action to deliver fair support to all our users.

Again, I’m sorry you’ve been left with a feeling of disappointment and I’ll certainly connect with you by email on Monday so we can continue this dialog.

[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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