Issues with recurring events (not working smoothly)

[Gerald]

Hi Guys, we are trying to implement Events Calendar (Pro) for the first time. One of the reasones we decided to first give Events Calendar Pro was the fact that it would support recurring events. I’m not so happy with it realizing the following issues with my recurring events:

– Sometimes, a recurring event is not being published at all: When trying to publish a recurring event, it sometimes occurs that the the “loading” circle shows up, but the event never gehts published. When I go back to my events list, I can see that the entry is in “editing mode”. But even when I try to press “publish” again – it just won’t work … Known bug?

– We often need to creat a series of event (in most cases, for an entire year or even longer), then edit the details for every single event. In some cases, I had to experience that a single event just wasn’t saved correctly. Could it be that editing recurring events isn’t that reliable then working with single events?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

[Rob]

Hey Philipp. Thanks for reaching out here, and for your purchase of Events Calendar PRO. Sorry to hear you’re having issues. Both of these problems you’re reporting here are certainly not the intended core behavior of the plugin, and since we’re not able to recreate them locally it does seem like there is something specific to your install at play here. We’re happy to do whatever we can to help get this sorted.

The first item: the few times this has come up for users in the past, it usually was either a PHP/memory issue for their site or a conflict with another plugin. Any chance either of those could be at play here? There is one other situation that could be at play here: if you had a saved recurrence pattern, then attempted to publish it without electing if you wanted your changes applied to this event or all future events, the infinite spin would occur. Here’s a screencast of that: http://screencast.com/t/RlWYN2ZL4z. This can be avoided by simply clicking one of the options in the pop-up instead of closing it. Could this be related to your situation? Does it share any patterns with it, based on what you see in the screencast?

For the second issue: not positive I understand here, but if you modify an individual event in a broader recurrence patterns and apply those changes just to that event (using the popup showed in my screencast above), it will break that instance out of the broader recurrence pattern and make it into a standalone event. Only when changes are applied to all future events does the recurrence stay true. Could that be related here?

Thanks for your patience so far. Let us know about these points above and we’ll do what we can to assist.

[Gerald]

Hi Rob,

Highly appreciate your quick and detailed reply! Which makes me confident that we have made the right decision with Events Calendar PRO.

It was very good to see your screencast. I can confirm that the exact same thing is what is happening with all my current recurring events right now. The most interesting thing (and this might be very interesting!) was actually seeing the popup “Saving recurring Event (Future Events/Only this Event)” – I’m pretty sure that this never showed up in the past when I saved a recurring event, even when it was saved correctly.

I deactived 20 different plugins – after which I was able to update the recurring events which I couldn’t update before. I was also able to save the one recurring event, which was only in DRAFT mode before. And: The Pop-Up showed up! Great. Here is the bad Plugin which has caused the issue: Hi Rob,

Highly appreciate your quick and detailed reply! Which makes me confident that we have made the right decision with Events Calendar PRO.

It was very good to see your screencast. I can confirm that the exact same thing is what is happening with all my current recurring events right now. The most interesting thing (and this might be very interesting!) was actually seeing the popup “Saving recurring Event (Future Events/Only this Event)” – I’m pretty sure that this never showed up in the past when I saved a recurring event, even when it was saved correctly.

I deactived 20 different plugins – after which I was able to update the recurring events which I couldn’t update before. I was also able to save the one recurring event, which was only in DRAFT mode before. And: The Pop-Up showed up! Great. Here is the bad Plugin which has caused the issue: Sugar Modal Windows (http://pippinsplugins.com/sugar-modal-windows-plugin), even another premium plugin we paid for. What is your advise? Simply leave it deactived or any chance to find the error and get it resolved? Honestly, we are still early in our implementation phase, so it might be an option to find a different tool other than Sugar Modal. In case you can connect with those guys in order to check vulnerability issues, that of course would be wonderful!

Now, it doesn’t stop here. There’s another obversvation I made with another Plugin: Uji Countdown (http://www.wpmanage.com/uji-countdown/) changes the visual apperance of your pop-up window. The two boxes “Only this event” / “Future events” would no longer appear besides each other, but the one on top of the other. It wouldn’t impact the stability of editing my recurring events, as far as I can tell you. Just thought I would tell you in case this is interesting to you as well. Would you say we should be catious using this plugin along with Events Calendar PRO as well?

My next observatoin relates to the second point described above. First, thanks for the clarification. I understand now that an event, which was previously part of a series, would immediately fall out of the broader recurrence pattern – which makes sense! Although it would be good (feature request!) to define certain text areas in a recurring series that may be adapated (in fact need to be adapted), but would still remain connected to the recurring pattern. Now to the problem: Unfortunately, there is one particular event in my calendar, which correctly broke out of a series, where the same error still occurs when trying to save an updated version. It just wouldn’t save it (even with all plugins except your ones deactived). It currently looks like this is only an individual case, so you might not need to worry about this. Just wanted to let you know.

Last observation: I found that the filtering view (setting “recurring = Yes”) is a good way of keeping track of my recurring events. What doesn’t make sense to me, though, is the fact that after a single event broke out of the series, it would still show up in that list whereas in the column titled “recurring?” it says No. In fact, some of the broken instances would appear in that list, while other would not. This does look like a slight bug?

Best,
Philipp

[Rob]

Thanks for the follow-up, Philipp. You’ve done some digging it looks like 🙂

On the Sugar Modal Windows conflict: normally we cannot guarantee the plugin will work with everything else out there, but we try to resolve conflicts as best we can if our plugin is responsible for them. However we have had a few Twitter exchanges with Pippin before and I’ve reached out to him just now to see if there’s anyone on their team who’d be game to work with us. Fingers crossed, but if you’re on a specific timetable it may be worth looking for a backup just in case we can’t get this figured out in as timely a fashion as you need.

That’s interesting regarding the UJI Countdown changing the appearance of those pop-ups; it wouldn’t be the first time that had happened, and partially for that reason we’ll be reformatting how that pop-up looks in one of our next maintenance releases. If that is the only oddity you’re seeing, though, I’d say you should be fine running the two plugins together.

On the recurrence end: what you’re mentioning, of allowing events under certain criteria to be broken out of the pattern, has been requested quite a bit pretty much since we launched 2.0. We are definitely looking into advanced recurrence patterns like that for the 2.1 lifecycle as well.

Regarding the last point: that is interesting, and thanks to you we have identified a definite bug. I’ve logged this in the system so we can get it resolved in one of our upcoming monthly maintenance releases.

Hope that helps. Let me know your thoughts on the above, or if you have any other questions here. Thanks again for your support so far.

[Gerald]

Hello Rob,

Thank you for the reply! Have you heard back from Pippin regarding the Sugar Modal Windows plugin conflict? In case you guys are working on it already, please let us know. We could still wait to get this fixed for a couple more days or even few weeks. Thank you for keeping me in the loop.

All the other topics seem to be clarified for the moment. Thank you very much!

[Rob]

Hey there Philipp. I was actually out on vacation last week, but am back now and have begun the discussion with Pippin on this. I should be able to give you an update in some capacity this week and we will do all we can to get this fixed over the coming days/week. Stay tuned and please let me know if you need anything else in the interim.

[Gerald]

Hey Rob,

I wanted to let you know, that we are now replacing the Sugar Modal plugin by a similar plugin called Easy Modal. So there is no urgency or a need to follow-up, at least not from my side.

Appreciate all your great efforts in this thread!

Best,
Philipp

[Leah]

Thanks for letting us know Phillip! Good luck with everything 🙂

~Leah

[Author]

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