Issues with managing & editing recurring events

[deshub]

I’m working on a couple sites for fitness centers. Every week they have something like 30-40 classes of various kinds, which repeat every week more or less indefinitely. Often a class is repeated multiple times per week, sometimes multiple times daily, with the same class name. The clients prefer to have the ‘expiration date’ for recurring classes be at least a few months out, so that their users can see classes far in advance. In the admin view, there are dozens or hundreds of classes with repetitious names, and it therefore becomes difficult to find the original instance of a class if a global edit to the description, instructor, or other info is needed.

One option I considered, now that you have added tags, is to give each class a unique tag so that we could sort on that in the admin view. But the tag column in the event admin list does not trigger a sort. And tags dos not appear in the Add a Filter pulldown. Am I missing something?

If there was an option in the popup that appears when you edit a recurring event to edit ALL instances (even before the date of the particular instance you’re editing) this would not be such a concern. But since editing recurring events either affects only the single event (which then is removed from the recurring bunch) or all future events, this solution doesn’t work. In other words, three options instead of two would be nice: [1] Edit this instance; [2] edit this instance and all the ones after it; and [3] edit all instances of this recurring event, even if they are dated prior to the one you’re editing now.

I guess this is sort of a feature request in a way but I’m wondering if there are any ways to use the system as it stands to make this situation easier to manage. I haven’t been using the system that long so maybe I just haven’t run across it yet. All in all a very cool plugin though!

[deshub]

Ok, I’m a moron, disregard the thing about the tags…but if anyone has any other ideas about how to make huge lists of similar events easier to navigate I’m all ears. Thanks!

[Barry]

Hi Deshub:

If there was an option in the popup that appears when you edit a recurring event to edit ALL instances (even before the date of the particular instance you’re editing) this would not be such a concern.

Fantastic idea, please do propose it on our feature request page and we’ll certainly consider it. In the meantime, as a workaround, if you edit any instance of a recurring event you’ll probably notice the editor URL is of the following pattern:

http://example.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=440&action=edit&eventDate=2013-11-05

Manually stripping the appended eventDate parameter and its value will take you to the “source” event:

http://example.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=440&action=edit

Does that help?

[deshub]

Thanks, Barry, that’s a great trick, and it seems to work on version 2 as well, which will make an older client happy. Seems like it would be pretty easy to add a little link in the editing screen, too (provided the event is recurring) that just says “Edit first instance of this event.”

[Barry]

Definitely – and again please do post a feature request 🙂

Since it sounds like we’re all sorted here I’ll go ahead and close this thread – if we can help with anything else though do feel free to create new threads as needed.

Thanks!

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

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