Standard "Single Event" template not consistent across sites

[Joe]

We’ve recently done some upgrades and hosting provider moves to our websites, all of which run Events Calendar. Before the upgrades, they were on different versions of the plugin, and some ran just the free version and some had the Pro add-on. They are all now running v2.0.10 of the basic plugin and the PRO add-on. Soon, all of them will be on the latest version. Also, we are running WP 4.0 across all our sites.

Several of the sites were on v.1.6.4 until recently and our main site was on v2.0.10. My challenge is this: once I brought the other sites up to v.2.0.10, and ensured that the settings were the same, the display of a single event is not consistent between our websites. We are using the same theme on our different sites, and the code for the template selected for the “Events Template” is also the same. One note on this: it would seem that on the sites that were upgraded from 1.6.4 to 2.0.10, viewing a single event would cause a major error and the page would not render appropriately – again, this was using the same template as our main site with v2.0.10 that was working just fine. I had to upgrade the misbehaving site to the latest 3.8.1 version to get the single events pages to render at all, and they have a screwed up event-info layout compared to v2.0.10.

So, to summarize, I am trying to find what’s causing the screwed up display of single events on one of my sites compared with another site that runs v2.0.10 (TEC and PRO add-on). I’d like to get things consistent across all sites. All of these sites were originally built by someone else who left me zero documentation, but I am assuming that that person didn’t change your default code that renders the single event info (although I could be wrong).

Here are the URLs for the sites in question (direct to a single event). While the sites are live, I’m going to send you their development addresses so we can adjust things without affecting the live sites:

http://dev-barrett-downtown.ws.asu.edu/event/2014-centennial-lecture-test/
(site originally on v1.6.4 of TEC, no PRO. Later upgraded to v2.0.10 of TEC and PRO, single event page would not render. Now on v3.8.1 of TEC and PRO)

http://dev-barrett-honors.ws.asu.edu/event/centennial-lecture-global-freshwater-future/
(running v2.0.10 of TEC and PRO – will upgrade to 3.8.1 once template issue is resolved across all sites.)

Please let me know any additional info I can provide, or if I need to create a temp login so you can look at settings in WP, thanks!

–Joe

[Brook]

Howdy Joe,

That is some big leaps in version numbers! Happy to see you upgrading.

I would suspect that this is caused by one of two things. First, does your theme folder (/wp-content/themes/fixed-blix/) have an folder in side of it, or any files, labeled “events”? If so, I bet you will need to actually completely rewrite the customizations for 3.x version of the plugin. Although, it seems possible that you might just be able to remove those customizations. The new default look for the single events is pretty good looking. You might find that you are just happy with it. Simply renaming the “events” folder might be all you will need to disable your customizations and fix it. But, it might be more complex than that unfortunately. Hard to say until you try. Second possibility, there is a JS error causing some weird side effects. You definitely have a JS error on your site. I doubt it is responsible for much if any of the changes in look between your two sites. But, it might be causing its own problems. It is likely that the first suspicion step will actually resolve this though.

Let me know if you have any more questions along the way. If not, what was the result there? Cheers!

– Brook

[Joe]

It does have a folder called Events inside our theme folder. My concern is that on the 3 sites that we upgraded from 1.6.4 to only 2.0.10 – and I selected “Default Events Template” or whatever its called, the site “bombs” when I try to go to an individual event page. Are there perhaps some code that needed to be migrated to our theme folder during the upgrade process from 1.6.4 to 2.0.10 that didn’t make it?

I do want to get us onto the latest version, but I don’t have time right now to re-write the customizations – probably will after Thanksgiving.

It appears that the only site with the ‘major’ issue is our downtown site, which went from 1.6.4 to 2.0.10. It has the problem with the event template being set to “Default Events Template” and gives this error on the backend of things: Call to a member function loadDomainStylesScripts() on a non-object /wp-content/themes/fixed-blix/events/single.php:3
called from /wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar/views/ecp-single-template.php:23 The front-end page just stops rendering right where the content should be. Should I copy our good code that is known to be working from a different site’s “theme / events” folder?

I know that you are probably not supposed to support older versions, such a 2.0.10 – but I just need to know approximately what to try to get this working for the moment and then I can follow your guide to re-do the customizations for 3.x

Please advise, thank you 🙂
–Joe

[Brook]

I missed your response Joe! My bad. 🙁

I honestly have no idea why your site bombs. Have you tried renaming said folder, or removing it from your server (assuming you have backed it up elsewhere)? That very well might fix it.

We renamed our customizations folder from /events/ to/tribe-events/ ins 3.0+. This was also at the same time when customization had to be rewritten from the groundup. OUR API became a lot easier to use and more powerful, but it broke tons of stuff in the process necessitating full rewrites, unfortunate but necessary. I am not sure what we could do to get your code working short of a full rewrite. It probably makes the most sense to stick on the 2.x version until you have time to rewrite. Or you can try to strip out any custom code, and as mentioned above a good place to start is renaming the events folder.

I wish I could be of more help. Please let me know if you have questions and such.

– Brook

[Joe]

Thanks Brook, no worries!
I was able to get things corrected, I think by basically just ensuring that I fully reverted to our 2.x version and re-working the events theme template we were using, along with some of the other templates in the theme’s events folder.
We are now done with our ‘move’ project and things are running smoothly. My next goal is to bring us up to 3.8.1 – and now that I have an appropriate testing environment, this is easier to work with. Everything is generally working on 3.8.1, except I still have a strange formatting issue that involves the “add to calendar buttons” DIV on the single event page. Take a look at this as an example: http://dev-barrett-honors.ws.asu.edu/event/end-semester-celebration-laser-tag/
I’ve tried turning our theme off entirely, and going back to 2012 – and that, of course, fixes the problem. I’m just not an absolute expert in CSS these days and our site was originally built by someone else, and I can’t seem to understand why those calendar buttons don’t sit on their own line and don’t obey the CSS flow of the site. I’m thinking of trying perhaps one or two weird workarounds, but wanted to know if you had any suggestions. Last time I had mentioned this, you said we had a JS error, which I see, but it seems to be unrelated.
Anyways, let me know what you think, many thanks!
–Joe

[Brook]

Howdy again Joe,

Those buttons have display:block; set for them. That forces all neighboring content to appear underneath. Perhaps you want to set them to display: inline-block or display: inline?

– Brook

[Joe]

Hi Brook, thanks for the idea. I hadn’t dug that deep into the core css files, as I was wary of directly updating them. Anyhow, I’ve added some additional css overrides in single-event.php in my theme folder. They still don’t seem to be having an effect. Can you have a look at that URL again from the last post to see if perhaps I’m doing something wrong? I adjusted the location of the css to ensure it is before the code that creates the calendar buttons, still no effect 🙁
Thanks!

[Brook]

Howdy Joe,

It would seems those buttons no longer had a display:block applied to them, but they do have a float: right and a clear:both. The clear both prevents them from appearing side-by-side. The float:right pushes them to the right, but also removes their natural padding. If you set them to clear:none it should fix it, but you might have to add some margins or padding or something.

Just so you know, we do not ordinarily provide such specific CSS advice here, because it falls well outside our scope of support. I hope that makes sense. Going forward, I am very glad to further assist you to the extent outlined in out support agreement which is more general overview of how to do changes.

Did that advice help you fix it?

– Brook

[Joe]

Sure, I understand it is out of scope. It just seemed fairly unusual that these buttons wouldn’t be set a similar way to the previous generation (2.x), when they were very similar buttons but they aligned horizontally by default and there were no real issues getting that version implemented with our theme. I understand upgrading things, and 3.x is a substantial upgrade, but still, I would think things would work a bit better out of the box. I’ve been in this industry way too long and am a bit jaded by the lack of true standards on the web :/ You guys, overall, do make a good product tho 🙂

[Brook]

Howdy Joe,

Thanks for your understanding. The web is definitely a bit of a free for all. It is both a blessing and a curse. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do.

– Brook

[Brook]

Since we have not heard back in a while I am going to archive this topic. If you need anything else though please feel free to open a new topic. We will be glad to help. Cheers!

– Brook

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