Recurring Events propagating incorrectly.

[michelleabt]

The months August, September and October propagate the event “Shabbat Around the Table”
properly. The third friday of every month.

However, November and onward the event shows up twice, once on Friday and then again on Saturday. The end time is also different it shows 1AM rather than 8pm. I have some screenshots if needed.

I reverted to 2014 default WordPress theme with plugins disabled because the 2011 theme was not available to test for a conflict. The duplicate events were still occurring when I did this.

Your help would be much appreciated!

[Brook]

Howdy michelleabt,

I apologize for my delay in getting back to you. I started researching this issue early yesterday, but was pulled away and never finished.

I have seen this issue a few times before. Generally it boils down to a problem plugin, or once recently a theme. The real trick on testing it out, is that event times appear to be shifted when the event is created. So, to test for conflicts you can not simply disable the theme and plugins, then check to see if the dates are fixed. Rather, you must disable plugins and themes, then try recreating the recurring event. If the new event has the correct times, then you enable your theme and recreate an events, If it still works, then you reenable a plugin..

I know this is a pain. I really wish there was a better way. But we need to figure out where the problem is before trying to figure out how to fix it.

Could you try testing for conflicts once again, only this time try creating a new event as outlined above? Let me know if there are any questions or anything along the way. Cheers!

– Brook

[michelleabt]

Hi Brook,

It looks like the time stamp 6:00pm – 8:00pm is causing the problem because I used recurring events with a different time frame and it worked. The theme works fine.

The plugin conflict is coming from: Event Espresso – Recurring Events

I was only able to get it to cause a problem with this time frame selected: 6:00pm – 8:00pm

We use Event Espresso to setup registration for special events along with this calendar. Could you please advise what our next steps should be?

Thanks for your time.

[Brook]

Thank you Michelle for your thorough testing there. Good to know Event Espresso can cause this problem.

We have seen a random smattering of plugins/themes that have this problem lately. So far they all have one thing in common, they set the default timezone to something other than UTC, usually via PHP’s date_default_timezone_set(). It is a bit of a strange thing to do as it changes this system wide for all PHP code, including other WP Plugins like ours.

On our end we are looking into ways to maybe just ignore this setting in a future version. So that even if a third party plugin is not necessarily playing nice, you will not experience glitches.

You might inquire of the theme author and ask them if they are changing PHP’s timezone. If so, would it be possible to not do that, and instead implement a more local scoped timezone option (one that does not modify global settings)? That is probably a good idea anyways. Because if another plugin on the same system also modifies timezone, then the Theme will be the one that ends up experiencing glitches. That is no good either. Not modifying these settings is usually possible, and is a great way to make your code broadly compatible with other themes and plugins.

Does that all make sense? Unless you are skilled with PHP, it probably makes sense for you to leave and modifications to the theme developer. Even if you are a PHP savant, it might make more sense to have the original dev take a look. Let me know if I can be of further help. Cheers!

– Brook

[michelleabt]

Hey Brook,
I am the theme’s developer and we never modified the default time zones. There was no reason to.

UTC time is 2014-08-13 13:39:35 Local time is 2014-08-13 9:39:35 is even listed in the wordpress general settings.

What are the next steps?

-Chris

[Brook]

Oh, my mistake. When you said Event Espresso my mind blanked and I thought you were referring to the Espresso Theme with events integration. Thank you, Chris.

In that case, the logical first step would be to contact the plugin developer, not the theme dev. Event Espresso recently added support for The Events Calendar, which we are stoked about. But, it is possible there are still some kinks to be worked out. This will be the most permanent solution.

There is a second optional step: one of our users also had some success with making a modification to our plugin. Here is his explanation of the modification. I do not generally recommend modifying our plugin, as those modifications are lost with each update. However, if it works for you then it will immediately fix the issue while we work with Event Espresso to look into this and see about a long term fix.

On that note I have been talking with my manager and the developers about this today. We would like to reach out to Event Espresso ourselves and see what we can do. Our first step is to recreate the problem. None of our staff has access to Event Espresso, so we will need that. Then assuming we can recreate the problem we can figure out a way to fix it. Again, it is likely that this relates to the date_default_timezone_set(), in which case we are already working towards a fix. But, I would need to confirm that is the problem.

Is that all clear? Those steps work for you? Let me know!

– Brook

[Brook]

Since this topic has gone for a spell without an update I am going to archive. If you do still need your issue addresses, please reach out to us with a new topic. Thanks!

– Brook

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