Sidebar locations missing in admin with EC Pro activated

[Greg Cole]

After upgrading to WP 3.9 and latest EC Pro, I am not able to edit sidebars/widgets. When EC Pro is active, the available widgets are listed, but no locations are present to drag/drop them to. I am using Avada theme (latest 3.4.3) and have tried disabling all other plug-ins and also activating default twentyfourteen theme – same issue. Only solution is to deactivate EC Pro.

[Greg Cole]

I found the hotfix plug-in issue and ran it to remove duplicate recurring events added by the update. It ran for quite a bit, then had my events paired down to around 2300 total. I went to the widgets admin area and the widget locations did load (slowly). I then clicked on Appearance >> Customize and now get the following error:

Edit Add Events Countdown
Events Countdown

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 64 bytes) in /home/mesabcc/public_html/wp-includes/meta.php on line 781

Going back to the Appearance >> Widgets page is once again blank. No new events have been added. Clearing cache does nothing. Need help with getting this plug-in stable for production.

[Barry]

I’m sorry you’re experiencing difficulties, but glad you found the clean up plugin 🙂

It ran for quite a bit, then had my events paired down to around 2300 total.

Can you confirm if this is the “true” number of events (are you satisfied that there are no or very few duplicates remaining)? If it is, then it may be we need to deactivate the Events Countdown widget. Can you try adding this code to your theme’s functions.php file:

remove_action( 'widgets_init', 'tribe_countdown_register_widget' );

Does that help at all here, if only as a stop-gap measure?

[Greg Cole]

I no longer see duplicates, but there were still a large number of recurring events (church site – many events are recurring each week like service times, ministry meetings, etc). I changed the default settings for recurring events to remove events older than 3 months and only create recurring events 12 months in the future – then edsited/re-saved all recurring events. This changed my total number of events to around 1250 and the widget area is again loading. This does appear to be tied to the countdown widget – the widget screen ‘freezes’ after that widget is displayed and the error returned on the customize screen points to that as well. I’ll add the code above, but would like to know how the plug-in can be better optimized to avoid such issues in the future. Also, how do we update recurring events in the future, after the 12 months is up? Do we edit each event and set new end dates?

Cheers!

[Greg Cole]

Adding the above code has restored access and improved load time considerably for the widget page. Looks like Countdown Widget is the issue…

[Barry]

That’s unfortunate (re the countdown widget) but does tie into a known issue – the best thing here, if possible, is to live without it – by disabling it as you have done – and we’ll have a think about how we might improve efficiency in this area.

Also, how do we update recurring events in the future, after the 12 months is up? Do we edit each event and set new end dates?

If you have an event that recurs forever (or far into the future) and have configured things so that the actual instances are only generated 12 months in advance then you need do nothing more 🙂

Subsequent events will be generated on a rolling basis as time goes by, so that you continually have an “envelope” of recurring events running back 3 months from the current date and continuing for 12 months into the future (there may be some slight disparity here depending on when you look at your set of events and when the clean up and generation tasks run, but broadly speaking this should hold true).

Does that clarify things?

[Greg Cole]

Thanks – that makes sense… Hopefully the memory issue with the Countdown Widget can be resolved in future releases. Cheers!

[Barry]

Definitely.

I’ll close this thread for the time being – but we’ll do our best to circle back round and post an update once we’ve got something substantive to report re the countdown widget.

Thanks for your patience and support 🙂

[Leah]

Hi there,

I just wanted to update you here. We were not able to fix this issue in time for our upcoming release (3.6). However, it is still very much a priority and we hope to have it corrected in the next maintenance release. We will keep you posted on our progress. Thank you for your patience and support!

Best,
Leah

[Leah]

Hi there,

I just wanted to drop in and update you on the status of this issue. We are working on the upcoming 3.7 release and are happy to say that a fix for this issue will be included. Please keep an eye on your Updates and Plugins pages for an update prompt. If you have any trouble or continue to see this issue after updating, please start a new thread and we can assist you from there. Thank you for your patience while we worked on this issue.

Best,
Leah

[Author]

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