My experience with this plugin

[Paul]

Pretty happy with this plugin – it seems to be working the way it says on the box… There are a couple of niggles which I’ve seen on the forums here but I don’t seem to be experiencing anything major (touch wood!)

I installed the plugin and immediately loaded up a whole bunch of FB pages to check. I ran the plugin manually and it pulled some events through – but it also threw up a white page 500 error. A bit of research and I found that I had to increase the PHP timeouts as the plugin seems to need a bit of time to do its thing. Did that and haven’t seen the error since.

An issue I encountered, and I suspect it is to do with the theme I am using, is that the thumbnails came through yukky. There may be a way to fix this if I spent time on it, but for now, once a bunch of events has come through I force regenerate the thumbnails and it solves the problem.

I have set the plugin to check daily and the bring everything in as pending. This is because we are adding these events to a calendar that uses other sources as well and every event needs to have a category assigned to it before we publish it.

So every day or so I check in on it, assign a category to the pending events, publish, force regen the thumbs and its done.

This is where I’m at after about a week of using the plugin.

A couple of things I’m not sure on is:
1) If the orginal Facebook event changes, does the plugin pick it up as a ‘new event’ and should it be reimported.
2) Is it possible to pull through and display the url of the original FB event in the content

Anyway – thanks folks for what is proving to be a very timesaving plugin for me – cheers!

[Josh]

Hey,

Thanks for reaching out to us and for the kind words.

For the image issue, it sounds like your theme may have a custom image size that is getting applied to the output, however since the import is putting the image through the regular upload process, the specific image sizes set by your theme are not getting created for the imported image.

In regards to your other questions though:

1. As long as the event id stays the same, the event shouldn’t be re-imported.
2. You should be able to manually generate a link based on the event ID that does get stored for the event. Having a URL that uses http://facebook.com/events/{{_FacebookID}} should link out to the event.

Let me know if this helps.

Thanks1

[Paul]

Thanks Josh – I will have a play around with the Facebook URL.

I may have spoken too soon unfortunately as I have just experienced what others have mentioned here, and that is today, for some unknown reason, it has pulled in every event again and created duplicates.

I am not sure what has triggered this. The only thing I have done differently today was assign a couple of events to another user?

I have saved them all as drafts rather than delete them and maybe the plugin may ‘see’ them there and not do this again?

Thinking about it I also deactivated and reactived another tribe plugin – Advanced Post Manager – dunno if it didn’t like that? Will keep an eye on this…

[Paul]

Just tried a manual import to see if it did it again but it didn’t…

[Josh]

Hey,

Thanks for following up with us!

I’m sorry to hear about the duplication of events when importing. Do you happen to still have those duplicated events within your site and database? If so, would you be willing to send a database dump for your site to support[at]theeventscalendar.com. This way I can look at the meta for each event and particularly the Facebook ID associated with the events and see if they are the same for the duplicated version of the events.

Thanks!

[Paul]

This reply is private.

[Josh]

Hey,

Thanks for sending that information however according to our support policies we’re unable to accept login credentials or login to customer sites due to the potential liability. I apologize for any inconvenience. If you would like though, you can still send a database dump to the previous email address.

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.

[Author]

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