Inconsistent Recurring Event URL

[jmdennis]

I’m having some trouble with the URL’s for recurring events being formatted very differently.

First, I entered a recurring event for “Pizza Lunch” and the URL’s were formatted fine like this: http://www.stagnesavon.org/calendar-event/pizza-lunch/2014-12-05/

Then, if I edit one of the recurring events, the URL is formatted fine like this: http://www.stagnesavon.org/calendar-event/pizza-lunch-2015-03-06/

However, I am having trouble with our “Hot Lunch” recurring event. I did add this recurring event a couple times and then had to delete it and I did click the Empty Trash button in WP to permanently delete the previous incorrect entries.

When I enter a new Hot Lunch recurring event, it uses an unattractive URL like this: http://www.stagnesavon.org/calendar-event/hot-lunch-6-2014-12-03/2014-12-03/

When I edit one of the recurring events, I am left with a URL like this: http://www.stagnesavon.org/calendar-event/hot-lunch-6/

How can I get our Hot Lunch events to use the same URL format as our Pizza Lunch entries?

[Barry]

Hi jmdennis,

When you create a recurring event initially the URLs – as you pointed out – should look something like this:

• example.com/my-event/all/ (list of all events in the series)
• example.com/my-event/2014-11-01/ (instance taking place on Nov 1)
• example.com/my-event/2014-12-01/ (instance taking place on Dec 1)
• …etc…

If you edit a single event in the series then what you are actually doing is breaking it out of the series – and a warning should appear to that effect, before you even reach the event editor:

Let’s suppose you decided to break out /my-event/2014-12-01/ in this manner. The post can’t share the same URL as before (it’s no longer a recurring event and that particular permalink pattern is reserved as a means of identifying recurring events only). Nor can it use /my-event/ which is already reserved.

Instead, the permalink is flattened out to /my-event-2014-12-01/ which preserves the slug and combines the date to provide what we hope is a meaningful URL.

Note that, at this point, example.com/my-event-2014-12-01/ is now a standalone event with no relationship to the other events in the chain it was originally a part of. If you now edit this and make it into a new recurring event it will behave in exactly the same way as any other event and any events in the series will have URLs like these:

• example.com/my-event-2014-12-01/2014-12-05/
• example.com/my-event-2014-12-01/2014-12-10/
• …etc…

I hope that gives a little insight into the process. Do note that, just as with posts and pages, you are free to edit the post slug if you find it undesirable.

How can I get our Hot Lunch events to use the same URL format as our Pizza Lunch entries?

The short answer is, they cannot be identical (otherwise there is no way WordPress or our plugin could differentiate between them) but you can certainly edit the slug for your pizza lunch entries to something clean like pizza-lunches … so long as that slug is not already “taken”, of course.

Does that clarify things?

[jmdennis]

Hi Barry,
Thank you for the detailed explanation. I do understand how this is supposed to work and it did work correctly for our first recurring event series “Pizza Lunch”.

When I create our second recurring event series “Hot Lunch”, something is just not working quite right. I create the recurring event and initially, it uses the correct URL for each event in this format: http://www.stagnesavon.org/calendar-event/hot-lunch/2014-11-19/.

When I click the “Edit Single” link, I do get the “You are about to break this event out of its series” message. I click OK, edit the event, and save it, but the URL is not updating correctly.

The single event that previously had the above URL is now changed to this URL: http://www.stagnesavon.org/calendar-event/hot-lunch/.
I believe it should be this: http://www.stagnesavon.org/calendar-event/hot-lunch-2014-11-19/

Meanwhile all of the remaining Hot Lunch recurring events are now being given URL’s in this format: http://www.stagnesavon.org/calendar-event/hot-lunch-2014-12-03/2014-12-03/.
I believe these should all still be in this format: http://www.stagnesavon.org/calendar-event/hot-lunch/2014-12-03/

I have tried deleting all of the Hot Lunch events several times, emptied trash, recreated the series of events again, and each time the URL’s come out in this same format. I don’t understand why the URL’s were created fine for our Pizza Lunch events, but not our Hot Lunch events. I hope I explained this clearly.

[Barry]

OK, thanks for clarifying. When you click edit single which event are you breaking out? Is it the first in the sequence (ie, is it the parent or “master” event, so to speak)?

[jmdennis]

I created this “Hot Lunch” recurring event to run every Wednesday from 11/19/14 – 06/17/14. Then, I need to edit the description in all of them because the menu is different every week. In this example, I am clicking on Edit Single for the first event scheduled on 11/19/14.

[Barry]

OK – so again, that’s actually the very behaviour I would expect.

The first event in a series is technically a parent post and “owns” the slug, so is allowed to retain it as is. Subsequent events that continue to live in the series are granted a new slug.

I definitely see why you might wonder about this scheme – particularly given your workflow – but nothing appears to be broken here and remember that the slugs are editable – so if you don’t like the scheme, you have to power to change it.

We’re absolutely welcome to any feature requests you might put forward, though, if you feel strongly about this and think others may also wish to see a change in how this functions.

In summary, it sounds like everything is behaving just as it was designed to behave. With that in mind I’ll close this thread, but once again do consider posting a feature request and if we can help with anything else please don’t hesitate to open a new thread and one of the team will be only too happy to help 🙂

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