Incorrect Shared Capacity when duplicating an event

[Joshua]

We’re using the Post Duplicator plugin to duplicate an event. This creates an event with a unique slug and date but the same event title. We then create two tickets using Shared Capacity, these tickets have the same names/titles as the tickets from the original event but unique SKUs (we essentially manually duplicate the tickets).
Within the WooCommerce Product page listing, we see all of the individual tickets with the correct ‘stock’. However, on the Event edit page and on the Event page on our site, Event Tickets Plus is showing the capacity from the original Event/Tickets (ie, it is subtracting original ticket stock sold from the new duplicated tickets).
If we switch the duplicated tickets to “Set capacity for this ticket only” then the correct stock is displayed everywhere.

[Joshua]

This reply is private.

[Joshua]

This reply is private.

[Joshua]

This reply is private.

[Andras]

Hey Joshua,

Thanks for reaching out!

Unfortunately duplicating the events with a duplicator will mess up the tickets / ticket capacities.

The tickets and ticket capacities / shared capacity is recorded on different levels in the database and the duplicator plugins usually do not go that deep, so there will be either inconsistencies or wrong connections.

To one of the duplicator plugin authors I posted a question about a similar issue, maybe that will help you. You can check it here: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/suggestion-remove-a-row-from-wp_postmeta/

All in all, duplication (at the moment) doesn’t work well with events that have tickets.

Cheers,
Andras

[Joshua]

Hi Andras,

Thanks for the reply. I do have to say I find it frustrating and a bit absurd – right now there’s no way to manage recurring events with tickets using TEC products. If I use the built-in recurring events feature, tickets are unusable, and now I can’t even duplicate events manually without messing tickets up.
We have 50+ ticketed events a month, easily half of which are monthly or weekly (recurring) events, and I can’t imagine we’re alone – what is the recommended solution to ticketed, recurring events?

[Andras]

Hey Joshua,

I’m really sorry about this and I understand your frustration. Handling that many events with tickets is definitely a time consuming job. Let’s see what we have and what we can do.

Tickets do not support recurring events in a way you would need them to. This functionality is on our long term roadmap. I would suggest you to cast your vote here to show your need / support for this.

Event duplication is also not a built-in feature, but for basic event data some third-party plugins (like the one you use) work well. It it different though when you have tickets included, because that means some extra metadata for the event as well, which shouldn’t be duplicated. To get a fix for this I would recommend you to reach out to the plugin developer with the issue so they can provide a fix. You can send them the link which I shared with you above which gives an idea of the issue.

So what can you do to make this easier?

If you would like separate tickets for all the events, then you cannot use recurring events. You will either need to break those recurring events apart, then create tickets for them separately. This is pretty time consuming.

You can use the CSV import functionality of the plugin. You can import Organizers, then Venues, then Events, then tickets. (Importing tickets only works if you are using WooCommerce, but I see you are.)

The drawback if the imports is that it does not support shared capacity / stock, only separate capacity for each of the tickets.

In this article you will find more information about the CSV imports:

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/csv-files-options-and-examples/

One other, less recommended option is duplicating as before, but make sure that either you don’t have sales on the source event yet OR that you manually set the ‘_tribe_progressive_ticket_current_number’ to zero in the database for the duplicate. I haven’t tested this solution, but in theory it should work.

Let me know if this helps somewhat.

Cheers,
Andras

[Joshua]

Hi Andras,

Thanks for the detailed response.
While I think that TEC would be better served by a built-in solution, I have done some further digging based on your information and it looks like I’ve got a solution using a 3rd party plugin. Using the ‘Duplicate Post‘ plugin, one can set certain meta fields that should not be copied (see attached screenshot).
I found that 4 fields actually need to be ‘unset’: _tribe_ticket_global_stock_level, _tribe_ticket_use_global_stock, _tribe_progressive_ticket_current_number, _tribe_ticket_capacity
Adding an exception for these meta fields within the Duplicate Post plugin seems to resolve the issue. I am now able to duplicate posts without retaining any shared stock information. If you see any potential issues with this method, please let me know.

Thanks again for the help

[Andras]

Joshua, this is an awesome find! Thank for experimenting with this and sharing your results!

Much much appreciated!

On first look all is fine with that. I would kindly like to ask you that if you hit any bumps with this method, then please give us an update in a new ticket and reference this one, so we and the community know about it.

I am going to close this ticket, but if you need anything else related to this topic or another please create a new ticket and we’ll be happy to help.

Thanks again and cheers,
Andras

PS: We’d be grateful if you would give us feedback on your satisfaction with support. Just click on one of the classy looking emojis below. 🙂 If you can spare a few words, that’s even better. Thanks!

PS2: If you like our plugins, and you didn’t yet do so 🙂 we would also be happy to receive a review in the wordpress.org repository. Much appreciated!
https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/the-events-calendar/
https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/event-tickets/

 

[Author]

Posts