Repeating Events with Unpredictable Dates

[Jamie]

Hi, I’ve been enjoying Events Calendar Pro for the last month and it suits my needs for adding venues and organizers easily and generating a calendar view. However I often have events that repeat sporadically, such as a lecture or workshop, hosted by the same organizers and at the same location but at varying dates and times. These events share the same title, description, featured image and, most importantly, comments. Many people use this area to review the event and give their recommendations, and it’s been difficult to maintain the same conversation over time.

I’ve been using a duplicate post plugin for the interim, but I find this not only confuses commenters, but it’s also been duplicating the featured image in the media section, and creating confusing permalinks (e.g. event-title-2, event-title-3) that I have to manage manually. Right now, I have 8 of the same event in the ECP management area and they’re not associated with each other even though they have the same content. That number will grow.

I am trying to find a method of adding independent (non-recurring) dates to an event similar to Event Calendar 3 (the plugin I used before that lacks features and support.) Any plans for this feature or hacks to make it work?

Thanks for a great product. I hope the Tribe team has a solution for this scenario!
– Jamie

[Rob]

Hi Jamie. Thanks for the note here, and for your words – glad to hear you’ve been enjoying the plugin so far. We as a team really appreciate your support.

We definitely hear the need for more randomized recurring events…that’s been one of the most requested features since launching 2.0, and we’re planning on integrating it into the 2.1 lifecycle. So there is relief in sight (if not on the immediate horizon).

It sounds like your issue is two-fold, though: beyond wanting to add independent events to a recurrence pattern, you’re looking to have the comments etc be the same…almost as if there was one entry that all the individual recurrence pattern links went to. Am I wrong there? If so let me know. Otherwise…that’s one we’ve had requested as well, but is more customized than we’ve got in the works at the time, but maybe you can accomplish what you’re going for through creative use of template tags (documented at https://theeventscalendar.com/support/documentation )?

Sorry I couldn’t offer up more. Just know that, at least on the recurrence flexibility front, we are working to provide a solution for users in your position. If we can do anything else or if you have any other questions just holler. Thanks again for your support!

[Jamie]

Yes and no. I’ve been testing (on a local build) how the ECP would handle multiple start times entered manually as “_EventStartDate” in the postmeta data and it’s achieving the results I want. So I can take the post ID and apply it to an _EventStartDate this month on a Saturday, and two months from now on a Tuesday, and 6 months from now on Monday and Tuesday, for instance.

However, I know this isn’t sustainable considering future permalink issues (appending event-title/xx/xx/xxxx/). There’s also the issue of ECP rewriting those manual inserts on post update. Any other issues long term that I should be aware of?

Again, I have no need for changing event duration, cost, and other metadata associated with the post. Just the dates.

Thanks for the reply, Rob.

[Rob]

You are definitely correct about the changes being overwritten, unfortunately. While this is a bit beyond me I can see what our dev Jonah might suggest when he hits the forums next. He’s back tomorrow so if he has any ideas he’ll share them then.

Sorry I didn’t have more myself. Let me know if I can do anything else.

[Rob]

Hey again Jamie. I talked this over with Jonah today and it looks like in order to fully evaluate this, it’d be a rather time consuming effort in which we’d need to dig into your code and test the ramifications of what works & what doesn’t. Unfortunately we’re a small team with limited bandwidth and aren’t in the position to provide that degree of support.

This being said, the devs have confirmed that if this solution is working for you, you can feel free to run with it — just know that it isn’t officially supported and you’ll want to change to the “official” method whenever it is introduced during the 2.1 lifecycle, as my guess is your method will cease to function at that point.

Hope this helps. If you’ve got any other questions, let me know.

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

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