re: Recurring Events Very Flawed

[Yehuda]

This is a great plugin, in general, but your thought process around recurring events is quite backwards. Basically, for recurring events you simply create a new post for every single date for the event, and thereby create duplicate posts of the same exact event. If an event that recurs is only different due to dates, what is the point of creating duplicate posts of the same content? Aside from creating duplicate content for SEO, this overloads the database with unneccessary content, and makes it hard to manage when you have alot of events with recurring dates. In my opinion, the better way to do this (and I’ve had to tweak your plugin to get this to work), is to use custom fields to store the different dates from the same course. So basically, the event is listed once, and the dates for that event are simply store as additional custom fields (key-value) for that post. I recommend you re-work your plugin to do recurring events that way. It is more intuitive, easier to manage, and you eliminate the issue with recurring content. Thanks

[Melissa]

I agree with your take on this. I purchase the Pro version so I wouldn’t have to duplicate the events. I took your idea of adding the additional dates as custom fields but then those are not showing up in the calendar. Therefore, I will end up having to add each date in. I also don’t see a way to copy or clone the first event so it looks like I have to create each one from scratch. Am I missing something?

[Yehuda]

No you are not missing anything. It’s a massive pain. What I do right now is to make an event recurring and then have the Events create all the event posts with the recurring dates. This way they show up in the calendar. Then I just go to the first event that is published (the one with the URL without any dates) and add all the recurring dates into seperate custom fields. This becomes my main event post. I use basic wordpress to then display these date custom fields on the course page. Finally, I redirect all the other posts for this course which differ only because of the date, to the main event post. In that way, the other posts with different dates will show up in the calender, but when a user clicks on that post, they are just redirected to the first main event post, where the dates are entered into the custom fields.

Yes, this is a hack and a massive pain. But, I see no other way to do it, until they fix this. Im also a little pissed I paid for recurring events, when the thought process behind implementing this feature is so backwards.

[Melissa]

Thank you for that detailed explanation. I hope this gets fixed soon as it’s the reason I purchased the pro version.

[Hunter]

Hello and welcome to the both of you 🙂

We truly appreciate you taking the time to voice your constructive feedback and include the workaround that best fits your needs. We have a few open feature and bug reports aimed at improving how the plugin handles recurring events, so I’ll go ahead and add this forum thread to said reports. I recommend also visiting our UserVoice Feature Ideas page and submitting the feedback there.

I don’t have any specific as to what changes they have planned nor when they’ll be available in an upcoming release, but as previously stated… we’re always working to improve recurring events as we understand it’s an important feature for many of our users.

If things are just too much of a pain for you, we have a 30-day money back refund policy. If that’s the route you would like to go, please visit our Refunds page and we’d be happy to get that processed for you.

Thanks again for the valuable feedback please stay tuned to our Release Notes and the plugin changelogs for more information. Thanks again and let me know if you’ve got any additional questions or comments. Cheers!

[Yehuda]

Thank you for feedback. I submitted this to the User Voice Features. Honestly, you have a great plugin, in general, so I see no need to ask for a refund, and I’m hoping my payment as well as others will get your team to fix this feature soon, because recurring events is basically useless as is. It is just shocking to me that recurring events was coded in this manner, when it is so obvious that dates should simply be stored as multiple custom fields for one event. Also, it is so contrary to basic coding practice to duplicate something in this manner (you simply don’t duplicate things, that have a one-to-many relationship – you just need one ID and then store the MANY referencing the one ID – so ONE event and then store the dates as custom fields referncing the ONE event) , that it makes me wary of buying your other premium add-ons that I need also. Anyway, thanks again for all your hard work and keep it up.

[Yehuda]

BTW, for anyone else having a problem with duplicate URL’s because of recurring events, you can use the code below in your htaccess to redirect all of the URL’s with dates in them to the main event page that won’t have the dates in them. If you don’t know about htacces do NOT use this. Get some help from someone that does know about regular expressions. Anyway, if you implment the redirect below, you can then just create recurring events that show up in the calendar, add the dates to customs fields on a main post, and then just redirect all those other pesky date events to the main post.
Redirect:
/event/(.+?)-[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}/{0,1}
to
/event/$1/

[Hunter]

Hi and welcome back,

Thank you once again for taking the time to give your thoughts on how the plugin can be improved and sharing the solutions for others to use. I’ll go ahead and close this thread out, but you know where to find us if you have any more questions or requests for upcoming maintenance and feature releases. Have a wonderful holiday season and take care!

[Author]

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