Recurring Event Series not displaying correct days when existing event edited

[Adam]

Hi Support Team,

I’m experiencing an issue when I edit existing recurring events. The events show correctly on the calendar front end, however, when editing an existing event the Event Series show the incorrect settings.

I’ve recorded a video for you showing exactly what I mean. I’ve uploaded it to Vimeo and will send a private link along with a password to view it.

[Adam]

This reply is private.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Adam,

Welcome back and thanks for reaching out!

As a first step, let’s try to rule out if there is some type of conflict at play.
This is usually because of:

1.    A conflict with another plugin

2.    A conflict with your WordPress theme

3.    A template customization for the Events Calendar that requires updating

When it comes to that type of issue, it is preferable to troubleshoot in a staging environment if you have one.

A first quick test is to simply temporarily revert back to a default WordPress theme such as twenty-sixteen to see if the issue persists.

The next step would be to go through our testing for conflicts procedure and let us know what you find out.

Basically the goal here is to revert back to a bare WordPress installation to see if the problem persists. It also allows us to pinpoint what the cause of the issue is.

But, before you do that, there are 2 things I would advise:

1.    Make a backup of your database

2.    Consider activating a “Maintenance Page” plugin if you are doing this on your live site (to minimize impact on your visitors)

Here is our Knowledgebase article on testing for conflicts, for your reference: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/testing-for-conflicts/

Let me know how it goes and if you have any other questions on this topic along the way!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Adam]

Hi Jaime,

I had tried all of this before raising the support thread.
Disabled all plugins, ran WordPress theme 2015, removed all custom code from functions.php but still the problem remained.

Best regards,
Adam.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Adam,

Thank you for your patience and for running those conflict tests ahead of time.  I’m sorry that you are still experiencing this issue.

I tried to replicate the issue on my test site but was unable achieve the same results that you are getting.  Your issue may be caused by the settings that exist around recurring events.  They are cleaned up after a given period of time and setting an event to recur indefinitely may cause some inconsistencies.  Please check out this article and see if altering your settings makes any difference:

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/pro-recurring-events/#longterm?utm_medium=plugin-ecp&utm_campaign=in-app

If it doesn’t, please enable WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG and share any PHP errors you see.

Also, are you experiencing the same issue if you add a new event?  Or is it only with pre-existing events?  Please share any additional settings that you think may be useful for me to reproduce the error as well.

Let me know how everything goes and if you have any other questions on this topic in the meantime.

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Adam]

Hi Jaime,

I tried creating a new recurring event, and the issue does not appear to be present on newly created recurring events.

Then I looked at existing recurring events; this seems like a problem with just the existing recurring events. I then tried just clicking the update button on a previous recurring event. This caused it to update to the 1st Monday of the month as in the incorrect settings in the video I showed you.

So it looks like somehow the recurring rules for existing events have become corrupted. Even though they are showing correctly in the calendar, the moment they are updated, they then obey the corrupted version of the recurring rule.

Best regards,

Adam.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Adam,

Thank you for your detailed explanations.  Were you able to locate any PHP errors in the log?  Also, once you updated the recurring event (to the wrong date), were you then able to revert it back to the correct date, or was it stuck on the 1st Monday of the month?  I’m just trying to get a sense of the exact situation, since I cannot replicate it myself.

I will continue to look for more information myself as well, while I await your response.  Thank you again for your patience!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Adam]

This reply is private.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Adam,

Thanks so much for getting those logs to me.  I have taken a look and I’m seeing a few things:

PHP Notice: /home/sites/harlowmasonichall.co.uk/public_html/wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar/src/deprecated/TribeDateUtils.php is deprecated since version 3.10! Use Tribe__Date_Utils instead. in /home/sites/harlowmasonichall.co.uk/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3959

This indicates that you may need to update the code that you are using to match what is currently being used in The Events Calendar.  If you look at your code on line 3959, it may help direct you were you need to make adjustments.

PHP Warning: Missing argument 2 for tribe_add_start_time_to_event_title(), called in /home/sites/harlowmasonichall.co.uk/public_html/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php on line 298 and defined in /home/sites/harlowmasonichall.co.uk/public_html/wp-content/themes/Avada/functions.php on line 192

PHP Notice: Undefined variable: post_id in /home/sites/harlowmasonichall.co.uk/public_html/wp-content/themes/Avada/functions.php on line 194

These two notices relate to your Avada theme.  You can take a look at them in the code, as indicated.

Let me know how it goes!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

 

[Adam]

Hi Jaime,

It looks like the first error is caused by code that sets a default start/end time to an event. This is no longer working since depreciated. This code was added with previous technical support. I’ve removed this code from the theme functions.php file.

It looks like the errors caused by line 192 & 194 in the theme functions.php are caused by code that adds the start time to the events on the month view of the calendar. This code was from previous technical support with Modern Tribe. The start time is actually being added to the events month view and can be viewed on the calendar page http://www.harlowmasonichall.co.uk/hall-calendar/
I really need this feature, is it possible to advise on what needs changing to bring in line with the current version of The Event Calendar?

/*
* START – Adds start time to event titles in Month view
*/
function tribe_add_start_time_to_event_title ( $post_title, $post_id ) {

if ( !tribe_is_event($post_id) ) return $post_title;
// Checks if it is the month view, modify this line to apply to more views
if ( !tribe_is_month() ) return $post_title;

$event_start_time = tribe_get_start_time( $post_id );

if ( !empty( $event_start_time ) ) {
$post_title = $event_start_time . ‘ – ‘ . $post_title;
}

return $post_title;
}
add_filter( ‘the_title’, ‘tribe_add_start_time_to_event_title’, 100, 2 );

/*

Best regards,
Adam.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your feedback.  I tested that code with a default theme on my local test site, and did not have any errors.

As a next step, could you please send me a copy of the latest version of your WordPress theme / child theme via a link to a .zip file link (stored Dropbox or Google Drive) so that I can run some tests on my end ? I recommend a private reply for that purpose.

Please ensure you are using the latest files as found on your actual website.

This way I will get access to any updates or customizations you might have made.

Let me know if you have any other questions along the way!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Adam]

This reply is private.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Adam,

Thanks so much for sending all of that information over here!  After doing some additional research, I would like to readdress the issue you brought up initially about recurring rules for existing events becoming corrupted, and I think you were right on the mark.  We’ve changed how we store recurrence data a few times and we’ve had to make a few backwards compatibility improvements for this area of the plugin, so it is possible that we’ve missed some things along the way.

With that being said, the quickest path to fixing this issue on your site may be for you to manually edit the recurring events that are having issues.  Were many events affected by this issue?  Please let me know what you think about taking this approach.

Let me know if you have any other questions along the way!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Adam]

Hi Jaime,

Yes, there are a lot of events affected by this. I can manually amend some of them as and when event changes come about but it would be a lot of work to manually update them all.

I’m guessing that the data must be somewhere in the database since the events do display correctly, or are these correctly shown events on the calendar simply events that were populated when the original recurrence rule was set. i.e. not being influenced by this “first Monday” bug because we haven’t gone forward in time enough for new future years events to be auto-generated?

If the developers are able to extract the correct recurrence rules from my database, does this mean that at some point in the future there will be a bug fix to the backwards compatibility of the recurring events? If so I could manually change the few that are needed to be changed now and hold on for the fix for the rest of the events. But I am worried that if the fix is too far in the future that events may begin to be populated on the first Monday instead of when intended 🙁

So short version is, yes I can update manually if fix looks a long way off.

Best regards,

Adam.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Adam,

Thank you for your patience and understanding throughout this process.  I can’t provide a whole lot of clarity on exactly what a fix would look like without some further investigation, and how it would affect the events on your site.

We appreciate your cooperation in manually fixing the events yourself and will continue to work on improving our products.

Please let me know if you need anything else in the meantime.

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Author]

Posts