No venue or organizer fields when exporting events

[Aaron Simms]

I would like to periodically export all events from the live site to my development workspace (without having to pony up for the Aggregator plugin) so I have an updated site for any major design changes but am running into a problem that the events export file (either WordPress XML or CSV via the WP All Export plugin) does not contain either the venue or organizer fields for each event. They’re totally missing. Moreover, after importing the events to the dev site, when I try to manually add venue and organizer back to each listing neither field will “stick” — they both revert to blank after updating the event. So I basically have to just delete and re-enter the entire event from scratch and exporting/importing is impossible.

Is this by design? And how can I export the events so they contain all fields including the rather critical Venue and Organizer?

• This topic was modified 6 years ago by Aaron Simms.

[Barry]

Hi Aaron,

Sorry to hear you’ve hit up against some difficulties. What you’ve described is not by design.

I did a quick test whereby I exported all data via WordPress’s native exporter, then imported into a fresh site. In the export file I saw the relevant post meta fields linking events to the venue and organizer post types:

<wp:postmeta>
	<wp:meta_key><![CDATA[_EventVenueID]]></wp:meta_key>
	<wp:meta_value><![CDATA[134]]></wp:meta_value>
</wp:postmeta>
<wp:postmeta>
	<wp:meta_key><![CDATA[_EventOrganizerID]]></wp:meta_key>
	<wp:meta_value><![CDATA[153]]></wp:meta_value>
</wp:postmeta>

The XML describing the actual venues and organizers was also present in the same file. Upon importing into a fresh site, the events were correctly associated with their venues and organizers. So, it seems we are not quite experiencing the same thing.

You don’t seem to have shared your system information so I’m unsure if your plugins are up-to-date or what else might be running alongside them, but perhaps it would be worth repeating our standard conflicting testing steps and – while nothing else but our plugins and a default theme is active (on both the source and target site, or else using suitable staging sites) – repeating the experiment.

[Aaron Simms]

Just to clarify, did you export *all* data, including all events and other site data (posts, pages etc.) in your test?

[Barry]

Hi!

Yes that was what I tried initially.

After a further test, though, I think you’re right – this will not necessarily work ‘out of the box’ (and the reason it worked for me was because I created a pristine test site).

It does seem like something that would be nice to support, though, so I’ll certainly go ahead and log a ticket on our internal tracker for this (though I can’t guarantee when we’ll action this, or if it will ultimately be approved).

[Aaron Simms]

Thanks for the update. Do you have any alternative suggestions for how to export events from the live site to a dev site (or vice versa)? Is this something the Event Aggregator would be able to handle more reliably?

[Barry]

Event Aggregator should work well in this situation.

theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/creating-hub-site-event-aggregator

It can import from other instances of The Events Calendar and, by using the REST API, is able to pull in a near exact replica of the original event. The above article describes one possible use for that, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be used in the context of an ‘event hub’ and could be used in your situation, too.

[Barry]

This reply is private.

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

Posts