Reoccurring Events

[Chris]

I have reoccurring events created and i need to duplicate them, and change the time/date.
IE: Morning Church Service, Evening Church Service, Thursday Night Church Service, etc.

So – I created a Morning Church Service and set it to reoccur through the end of the year.
I then duplicated the Morning Church Service (the original) and change the title to Evening Service and the time to 7pm.
When I saved – it did not create a new series as I was expecting, it changed all Morning events to Evening events – not cool!

[Trisha]

Hello, Chris!

Thank you for using The Events Calendar! I can help with this ?

This has to do with the way recurring events are configured both programmatically and in the database. Are you sure you duplicated the original event?

When I do the same thing in my local instance I get the following:

After I duplicate and save I get the following:

Recurring events can be a bit fiddly to set up and I’m sure using a duplicator adds some confusion to the mix.

If you did, indeed duplicate the correct (original) event then we have a different problem on our hands and will need to debug further!

Does this help answer your question? Let me know how it goes!

Cheers,
Trisha

[Chris]

I will retest this to make sure that it is the Original event that I am duplicating – BUT I have to say that if what your telling me is truly the case we have a MUCH bigger problem!

1. Duplicating posts ANYWHERE in WordPress has ALWAYS worked as I am expecting, not as your describing!

2. Listing events, by default, put the newest event op top. So if I create a reoccurring event that is weekly and end on the past day of the year – in June all I am going to see is December’s events. You are now saying that I have to “remember” when I created the original event and then try to go find it?

If I have a client that has been using TEC for (let’s say) a year and has (let’s say) 15 different reoccurring workshops a week – how am I to explain to that business owner that he has to either figure out “your way” or recreate each event each time the workshop series starts over again?

This seems like a extremely inefficient way to expect someone to use TEC – and a very lazy of programing on your part.

[Barry]

Hi Chris,

I’m sorry to hear that you’ve hit up against some difficulties. The last thing we want is for you to have a frustrating experience, but there are some things which we are not directly in control of.

In this case it sounds like you are using a third party duplication plugin and that, when applied to recurring events, various undesirable side effects take place. That’s unfortunate and I’m unsure exactly what the root problem is but my guess would be the plugin you are using is simply not designed to deal with (recurring) event data.

Most posts – whether pages, blogs posts or instances of custom post types in general – are generally very similar in nature. There is a post with various fields, and there is a bunch of post meta data. A general purpose post duplicator I’m sure would handle most of these well.

Recurring events, though, are more complicated. They consist of a parent post and a (potentially large) range of child posts, all with their own post meta data. Whenever they are created or updated sometimes it is also necessary to update data stored outside of the post and post meta tables: that to say, it’s not without complication.

If you need this sort of functionality, I’d recommend checking out a tool built especially for the job:

wordpress.org/plugins/duplicate-tec-event

We didn’t create it, so I can’t vouch for it, but it was written with events (including recurring events) in mind — so you might have more success with it than what you are currently using.

If I have a client that has been using TEC for (let’s say) a year and has (let’s say) 15 different reoccurring workshops a week – how am I to explain to that business owner that he has to either figure out “your way” or recreate each event each time the workshop series starts over again?

I take your point, here, but duplication facilities are not something we’ve ever provided or claimed to provide. For most users they have either been unnecessary or tools like the one I have linked to have given them what they needed.

That doesn’t mean we won’t ever add this, of course, just that there hasn’t been sufficient demand so far. To that end, please do feel free to comment on and up-vote this feature request — we could certainly reconsider its current status if it gains more traction and if existing plugins that provide this are not up to the task.

Thanks again for your feedback – and I do hope you have success with the Duplicate TEC Event plugin 🙂

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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