Prevent time change on import?

[alternatewords]

I’ve looked through the forum but couldn’t find a topic matching my inquiry.

I see that the FB plugin imports events into local time. I was wondering if there is a way to prevent this? We run an ecourse site and students attend from all over the world. They plan in-person meetups in their cities via Facebook. I need these events to come in under the actual time scheduled, e.g. NYC event at 11:00 AM EST to come in as 11:00 AM, a London event at 2:00PM UTC as 2:00 PM, etc. Would that be possible? I know I am asking exactly the opposite of what most users would want, but it makes sense in our environment.

[Julie Kuehl]

Hi alternatewords,

OK, I’ll be honest. I’m not sure we can do what you’re looking for with a Facebook import. But first, could you help me understand why you don’t want times converted to local time? Local time would be reflected for each person. It would know that an 11:00 London event isn’t the same as a 11:00 Eastern event. Wouldn’t that be desireable?

Pardon my curiosity, but you’ve got me perplexed. If I understand it better I can give you a clearer answer.

— Julie

[alternatewords]

Hi Julie,
I think I already found an answer to my question, in as much as TEC doesn’t offer any timezone tracking, which is quite unfortunate.
Our WP timezone is set to NY as we’re located on the east coast (Portsmouth, NH). However, events on FB are scheduled around the world. And the students of our ecourse are also from around the world.
The problem now is that if I import an event scheduled for London, which say is set to 11:00 AM UTC, imports as UTC-5, so 6:00 AM. There is no timezone identified declaring this as EST now. So students from London will see the event on Facebook as 11:00 AM, but as 6:00 AM on our site.
Unless you’re saying that TEC does account for a user’s own timezone? Meaning they see the event as 6:00 AM but in Google Calendar/iCal it will show up in their local timezone? I tried that by setting my time zone to UTC on my PC, but when I imported the event in question it still showed as simply 6:00 AM, not 11:00 AM. In Google I could pick a timezone manually, but that would be tedious.
Do let me know if I got this all wrong.

Thorsten

[alternatewords]

I did a bit more digging and actually came across another WP events plugin that allows importing Facebook events. Their approach is a bit different as they directly link to one’s Facebook account to pull pages, groups and friends. The most interesting option is groups, especially since we’re running a closed group. Their Facebook connection actually allows pulling public events from a closed group, keeping them in sync with updates on Facebook. That is something I was hoping your plugin would accomplish as well. It only does so partially as I need to plugin each event’s ID and import manually (and of course it’s not being kept in sync this way, or is if I re-import the same event?)

But, more importantly, it imports with the correct time and an identifier. For example, we have a Brooklyn event coming up. When I switched our WP to the Berlin timezone (to check for our German members) the event pulled in with a note similar to “11:00 AM eastern time (5:00PM)” – and it then exports it accordingly to Google and iCal. That’s exactly what I am looking for.

Now, I paid good money for your plugin so can’t just move on (and don’t want to as the other one messes with our complex install too much). Any chance at someone here taking a look at what they’re doing? I am not going to post a link or name the other plugin unless you’re ok with it.

Cheers,
Thorsten

[alternatewords]

Never mind, I was wrong (I have a VERY complex configuration). I had already switched back to eastern time zone.

So Facebook events are pulled in and converted to whatever the WP timezone is set to. That’s controlled by the API? So a German event scheduled at 10:00 AM UTC+1 will actually show up as 4:00 AM UTC-5 when pulled in to our site, insatiably confusing our German students who expect it to be 10:00 AM? Will it revert back to 10:00 AM if they export to iCal/Google?

I still like the other plugin’s group import option though, that would be nice to have here as well. We don’t have a lot of events but people do tend to change them a bit and right now we need to do manual updates to account for that rather than simply hitting refresh.

[Julie Kuehl]

Hey alternatewords,

I have experience in teaching across timezones. They do eventually make your eyes cross, don’t they. x_X

OK, first, the group calendar sync issue. You are correct that our plugin is an “importer” and not a sync solution. You can set it up to automatically import new events, but refreshing changes is not something it’s designed to do. It would be a nice feature though. If you’d like, you can go over to our Feature Ideas site (https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas) and place a vote. Looks like it’s something that’s already been mentioned.

Now, to the bigger issue of time zones… I’m not seeing any way we can accommodate your needs with our plugin as it’s currently designed. You are right that it is controlled by the Facebook API and not something we could really change.

Since you’ve given this a real go, and you’re such an edge case, I can offer you a refund if you email pro (at) tri.be with a link to this thread. Not the solution either one of us wanted probably, but I just don’t think we’re a good fit for what you need.

I hope you can find something that will work for you. I wish you all the best with your project!

— Julie

[alternatewords]

Hey Julie,

Thank you so much for your response and also for your generous refund offer. But TEC does so much right already that I’d rather keep it and deal with the shortcomings until enhancements come out – though I would rather see them sooner than later.

We do not have a ton of events anyway so I just have to manually adjust the times after each import. I’ll also establish some rules as to when we import an events (basically once it’s finalized) so that we avoid constant re-imports.

The timezone issue might be good to look at in general. I am sure there are quite few TEC users that schedule events across different timezones and it would be good to have at least some type of identifier.

TEC’s aesthetic works for us, it looks clean and well thought out. It fits perfectly with out site. So I’ve voted on the already existing feature ideas for the Facebook plugin and hope you guys consider them for a near future release.

Thank you,
Thorsten

[Julie Kuehl]

Hi Thorsten,

Wow. Thank you so much for your understanding and support. I’m glad we can meet what sounds like 95% of your needs. One thought I had is that our PRO add-on has Custom Event Attributes. Would using those be of any help to you at all? Still a manual process though, I suppose.

And thanks for adding your vote to the Feature Ideas page. That gets this feature on the radar for consideration.

Good luck with your calendar, and all the good work it reflects! Let us know if there’s anything else we can do for you.

— Julie

[alternatewords]

Hi Julie,

That’s quite brilliant! Thanks so much for that recommendation. I’ve added a custom filed called “Time Zone”. True, it’s manual, but works for now.

I’ve also added a URL custom field called “What’s My Time Zone?”. Would it be possible to have this populated with default content (which would be http://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/)? I have no problem digging in to the code itself to make that happen, I’ve had to ‘hack’ quite a few plugins lately to make them fit. I want students to quickly check their current time zone, which helps to clarify.

Thank you again,
Thorsten

[Julie Kuehl]

Hey Thorsten,

OK, another crazy idea for you. Maybe put one of these (http://www.worldtimeserver.com/clocks/) or something like it on your site?

Also, I know they had a similar issue for the WordSesh event (wordsesh.org). They’re planning another one in about a month, so the site isn’t fully developed at the moment. But they had a neat way of doing the same thing. All their events were set to UTC and I remember that there was a way to display your local time in UTC or some such thing. Might be something to keep an eye on.

I would think that if you’re willing to dig into the code, there’s got to be a way to make something like that happen. Have you seen our Themer’s Guide (https://theeventscalendar.com/support/documentation/events-calendar-themers-guide/) and Documentation (http://docs.tri.be/)? I guess I assumed you had by now, but I’m not seeing mention of it. You’ll probably find what you’re looking for there so you can make your customizations.

Good luck and let me know if I can point you to anything else.

— Julie

[Ken Charity]

We also host some web based e-training courses and we have people register from many states and also have trainers in different parts of the US. So coordination with every one was difficult in the beginning.

For our solution, we have edited the PHP templates to include the time zone abbreviations with the time that is displayed. We decided to use the company headquarter time as the base time which is (PST) and set as such in the wordpress admin.

`echo tribe_get_start_date( null, false, ‘g:i a – T’ )` is what we ended up using, then we created a special field in the event calendar for duration and list the length of the event (30 min, 45 min, 60 min, etc).

This solved for us that whoever saw the event knows that the event is in PST and let them calculate the time change on their own and based off the duration they knew when it would end as well.

Not sure how that works for the FB import but might help you with displaying your event time.

Thanks
Ken

[Julie Kuehl]

Thanks for sharing that Ken!

— Julie

[Hunter]

@alternatewords, would you mind sharing the name of that other Facebook import plugin you came across?

[alternatewords]

@joinfof It’s called All-In-One Event Calendar. It doesn’t work well on my site so I ended up not using it, but it does do a great job importing Facebook group events, even if the group itself is set to private – as long as the events are open to anyone. It also syncs events, which is great if an event changed on Facebook. And, it imports any event’s timezone (though it does change the time to local time still). Since it uses the FB API I am sure all this should work over here as well.

[Hunter]

Thanks for the quick response! I caught on to which plugin you were referring to a few minutes after I asked the question. I’ve been dabbling with events plugins for almost two years now and I’m currently making the transition from Events Manager.

There are quite a few major differences, the main being you need a much better understanding of php (which I’m still working on) for The Events Calendar.

I definitely wish this plugin had as many options Events Manager (free version) offers in the admin settings. I was quite surprised to see the pro version didn’t come with more features. I’m a little let down at the price for the amount of work still ahead of me, but I guess this is developing.

I’m currently rebuilding http://familyoffestivals.com on a test url, which is http://zeusmediagroup.com. I invite you to take a look at the work-in-progress and help me if you see I’m going down a road you’ve been down.

If you’ve ever got any questions or input, please email me at [email protected].

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