"Register this event with eventbrite.com?" switches back to "No", clears form

[Kirk]

Hello,
I’m having an issue with the EventBrite plugin –when I choose “Yes” for “Register this event with eventbrite.com”, fill out the form, and click “Update” on my event, the “Register this event with eventbrite.com” portion of the The Events Calendar form clears all fields and switches back to “No”. I’ve confirmed that the event is not registered with EventBrite.

It also appears that all past events that HAD EventBrite tickets have set themselves to “No” in this field as well.

As a troubleshooting step I’ve confirmed that all plugins and WordPress core are up to date. I have not attempted deactivating all other plugins, just because the site is currently in production and I’d like to avoid that step (which would interrupt our users) if possible.

What can I do to troubleshoot this issue?

[Barry]

Hi Kirk –

I’m sorry to hear you’ve experienced some difficulties, but thanks for posting and for sharing your system information.

On first glance, it looks as though everything has been set-up correctly. Before we go any further, though, I just want to double check something: when this problem occurs, do any warnings or error messages appear at the top of the editor screen (such as, “You did not select a venue” or similar)?

If not, would you be able to install Debug Bar and see if it captures any PHP-level problems that might be relevant here?

Thanks!

[Kirk]

Hi, thanks for getting back to me.

No alerts appear at the top of the post. I left some items unselected during the troubleshooting process for this issue so I’m familiar with the “You didn’t select a venue” alerts and the like –none appear.

Debug Bar actually produces its own errors when I try to create or to update an event:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [snip]/public_html/wp-content/plugins/widget-context/debug/debug-bar.php:2) in [snip]/public_html/wp-admin/post.php on line 197

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [snip]/public_html/wp-content/plugins/widget-context/debug/debug-bar.php:2) in [snip]/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 1228

To work around this, I deleted error_log files from the root and from /wp-admin on my site (to avoid confusion with older errors), attempted to re-submit an EventBrite event (with the same result as above), and then reviewed php errors generated by the site using cpanel’s tool, and by looking for error_log files directly on the server –no new errors were generated.

So it seems that PHP errors are not the issue. Where else can we look?

[Kirk]

Allow me to change my story completely!

I fixed the Debug Bar issue and enabled WP_DEBUG and fixed a few errors and I now have a different result when I submit an event to EventBrite!

I now get the following alert:

We were unable to sync your event to Eventbrite. Here’s what happened:

This Event Requires a Venue to sync to Eventbrite

I have definitely selected a venue, though! I even edited the venue and re-saved it to be sure.

Bizarrely, disabling WP_DEBUG makes this alert go away but the problem remains.

I hope this additional information (and change of symptoms) is helpful in troubleshooting this problem! Thanks and sorry for the incorrect report above.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Kirk.

[Barry]

No problem (and yep I don’t think it was Debug Bar itself which was triggering that error … based on the error message it sounds more like some code in Widget Context – one of the plugins you are using which tries to integrate with Debug Bar – which was behind that particular issue) 🙂

I now get the following alert:

We were unable to sync your event to Eventbrite. Here’s what happened:

This Event Requires a Venue to sync to Eventbrite

I have definitely selected a venue, though! I even edited the venue and re-saved it to be sure.

That’s still pretty odd, but at least we’re making some progress!

I would like to run through our standard troubleshooting steps at this point, which involves deactivating other plugins and indeed switching to a default theme – though I realize you are (understandably) reluctant to do so.

Here’s what I propose: can you create a new WordPress installation – it could simply sit in a subdirectory and be accessible at example.com/testwp until we’re done with this problem – and start with just our plugins and nothing else. Can you replicate this issue there?

Assuming for the moment everything works in that scenario, you could troubleshoot “in reverse” by incrementally adding the same plugins and ultimately the same theme as you have in production. That might let us zero in on whichever component is conflicting, if indeed one is conflicting.

Is that possible here?

[Kirk]

Very weirdly (as I added in an edit above after you had already replied), the alert about the venue goes away if I disable WP_DEBUG.

Alright, I’m not sure if this is a good test, but I set up a development copy of the site locally on my computer (using a Vagrant VM). I don’t how EventBrite API keys work and whether it’ll accept data from this local environment, but I hoped I would at least get an error message stating that problem if it occurred.

The local environment does not mimic the server I’m running the site on, so problems with specific versions of PHP (or whatever) could be eliminated by this test.

I deactivated all plugins except The Events Calendar plugins (TEC, TEC Pro, and TEC EventBrite Tickets).

I changed my theme to Twenty Fourteen.

And the original problem remained.

Specifically if WP_DEBUG is disabled, there are no alerts and no errors, and the EventBrite radio button switches to “No” and all of the EventBrite fields are cleared.

If WP_DEBUG is enabled I get the above-referenced alert about “Venue”, and the EventBrite radio button switches to “No” and all of the EventBrite fields are cleared.

Could it be an issue with the EventBrite API information I have? Does TEC produce an error message if the EventBrite API key isn’t accepted, or if there’s some other failure in delivery to EventBrite?

Thanks for your continued attention on this.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Kirk.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Kirk.

[Barry]

I’d think a Vagrant-based environment would be fine for testing this.

Could it be an issue with the EventBrite API information I have? Does TEC produce an error message if the EventBrite API key isn’t accepted, or if there’s some other failure in delivery to EventBrite?

It should flag up problems like missing API tokens (again, via an admin notice at the top of the screen) – but it doesn’t sound like that’s happening and the sys info you shared seems to be in order on that count.

When you set up the test environment, was it a clean database or did you pull in a dump from the production site? I’m wondering if something – I’m unsure what exactly – might be amiss with the venue and if using a fresh venue, where all fields are populated, might provide a different result.

[Barry]

…By the same token, running through the Get Authorization process as described here afresh in the test environment could be worth a shot.

[Kirk]

I pulled a copy of the live database. I’ll try two things:

1) I’ll create a brand new test venue and try that
2) I’ll try a fresh database and re-configure TEC and the EventBrite api keys.

Boy I hope #1 works because I do not want to spend all night doing #2 🙂

[Kirk]

Report Part 1:
A brand new venue does not resolve the issue.

Addendum: I also changed the EventBrite API keys to bad values (just entered garbage) and got no error related to that. The “venue” error is still the only one I get.

[Barry]

Hi Kirk,

I want to be absolutely sure I understand what you are seeing as there are a number of similar venue-related errors that can be displayed. In your case, is it just:

This Event Requires a Venue to sync to Eventbrite

That you see, and not:

The venue is missing

Assuming it is indeed the first of those only, that would help me to zero in on the point of failure.

Thanks for your further assistance here!

[Kirk]

Barry,
The alert is as quoted above (I copied and pasted). Here it is again:

We were unable to sync your event to Eventbrite. Here’s what happened:

This Event Requires a Venue to sync to Eventbrite

This is indeed the only alert that appears.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Kirk.

[Barry]

Thanks Kirk.

What I’d like to do is have you temporarily install and activate this plugin. With that done, if you can once again try to set up some tickets, we should get additional information (as an error message, at the top of the screen).

This might provide some insights as to what exactly is going wrong in your case. Please copy and paste or screenshot the error message and we can take a look 🙂

[Kirk]

Well that error is MUCH more informative!

We were unable to sync your event to Eventbrite. Here’s what happened:

Eventbrite troubleshooting:
Mode: create | EB ID: | Post: 2857 tribe_events | Venue: 234 tribe_venue | Evenbrite error: “The OAuth token you provided was invalid.”

I’m retrieving our EventBrite credentials now and I’ll reissue our tokens to see if that fixes it. I’ll report back as soon as I am able!

[Barry]

Definitely, that does seem to point squarely at the source of the problem, though at the same time it’s clear we could improve our built-in error messaging.

Let me know what you find!

[Author]

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