TEC and Avada

[Cindy]

Hello,

I want this ticket escalated.

Part 1: This is what I wrote in the ticket for Avada:

Dear Avada and TEC,

If a user had been using Avada and TEC for a period of time and everything worked and looked fine without any CSS coding or PHP, and then Avada and TEC got together so that TEC was a base component of Avada, but in the process, they messed up some very basic and common sense coding should one of them not fix it?

I ask because TEC blames theme and would offer no help except to send me to the themer guide. Avada blames TEC and is now pushing back at helping me telling me that this was my issue and to pay someone to fix it.

What is the issue you ask?

The items view excerpt NO LONGER HAS PARAGRAPHS OR SPACING BETWEEN SENTENCES. It used to. You can see that in my tickets. I didn’t need code to do that. This is beyond ridiculous.

Before this marriage, I had no issue with the color scheme or being able to change the color of text and add a hyperlink. Now it takes code to do that. AGAIN… I used to be able to do this. Very easily.

Now basically all my Avada tickets are about TEC. I always ask TEC first and I get told it is the theme issue and to see the themer guide or the code one. I DON”T know how to do code. I’m just trying to have what I had prior to this marriage.

So after pushing back to Muhammad at Avada, when Geoff B at TEC said they couldn’t help, I now have what I needed back in place. EXCEPT that it is no longer responsive on my cell phone. The words run outside of the frame. It took me three push back emails to Muhammad to get this done. And Muhammad telling me to pound sand if I need further help.

If something was working without customization and now it no longer works, that is a definition of a bug. Why should I pay someone to fix your bug EVERYTIME YOU DO MAJOR UPDATES? This is irresponsible and not customer centric. I don’t know if this is TEC or Avada issue so I’m sending this same message to both parties with the hopes someone will address this.

And the funny part? I now have TEC customers contacting ME to ask how I got the items list to look correct. That is just crazy.

Cindy

[Cindy]

Part 2:

Between the Avada posts and TEC post I actually did a Zoom meeting with another TEC user. He is using Be Theme. He also wanted to have PARAGRAPHS AND SENTENCE SPACING! And he didn’t want to show “Learn More” and to be able to do hyperlinks within the Items Excerpts.

I was able to give him the CSS and PHP that Avada provided for me. And he got it to work! So this tells me several things:

1. Other people want the Items list to read correctly. The way it used to. I shared with him that you guys had that figured out at one point. And now that it is broken you are blaming it on the theme and not helping people.
2. Other people do not want the learn more button. They don’t need it there for whatever reasons.
3. They want hyperlinks to work in the excerpt, again like it used to.
4. He is using Be Theme so you can no longer blame Avada. Now I get to go back and apologize to pushing them to fix this issue saying it was their fault. Not happy with that. But it is the right thing to do.
5. That it is really sad and perhaps scary that people are asking me, the clueless one, how to fix stuff that TEC broke because again it used to work before you started adding the Basic version right into the themes. That makes this a bug.
6.There is nothing special about what I’ve been requesting. Other people want it also. These are such basic items and end users SHOULD NOT have to pay someone to do code for it and then have to keep paying someone every time you do an upgrade. That is an extra expense on top of the $90 I pay TEC every year for support. Your developers need to do the right thing and fix the code so all of the above once again works.

TEC does some really cool stuff and when it is working it is awesome. That is why I stick with it. Please fix what you broke so I don’t have to keep dealing with how crappy it looks until I get someone to help me. For the past year, this has been a concept, but I’m getting to talk all of this live in a month or so and this will really suck if it takes days to get help for the same issue, over and over again.

[George]

Hey Cindy,

Thanks for reaching out and for sharing this feedback honestly and critically. I do genuinely appreciate it and have been looking into some of the claims you’ve been making to see where we can improve.

A big thing to point out is in response to what you write on your first post in this thread. You say, “and then Avada and TEC got together so that TEC was a base component of Avada”.

↑ To be absolutely clear, the inclusion of The Events Calendar inside the Avada team is something the Avada team has taken entirely upon themselves to do. We love the Avada theme, and try to support it as best as we can because many folks use it, but it’s actually bad practice within WordPress development to include plugins inside themes and we do not generally encourage any theme to do this.

The thing is, our plugins—like all WordPress plugins—are GPL-licensed, so any theme developer can use our plugins how they see fit, including putting plugins in their themes by default. I just want to make it absolutely clear, though, that this is not something we were involved with or that we even specifically endorse.

Next, it sounds like things like line-height and letter-spacing were big problems here. To be clear, these sorts of rules are dictated by theme stylesheets, not plugin stylesheets. I understand you’ve been hearing from both TEC and Avada that it’s the other person’s fault, and I totally understand how frustrating this is: still, it is just simply the case that font styles and text styles are dictated by themes, not plugins.

One thing that is tricky regardless of whether it’s the theme’s or the plugin’s responsibility is, unquestionably, excerpts—it sounds like excerpts have been especially troublesome here. Excerpts are tricky, and are a bit of an unsolvable problem in a way. If this sounds weird or like a cop-out, I hear you—but please check out this long blog post I wrote about the problems with excerpts, which I think will help explain some of the truly hard problems we face with them: https://theeventscalendar.com/the-trouble-with-excerpts/

I hope that article about excerpts helps a bit, and I hope that some of the information I’ve provided here helps to fill in some of the details about these issues.

In closing, you say, “please fix what you broke.” I’m sure you have explained this a number of times, but can you please specify the exact thing that is broken, and share a link to a page on your site that demonstrates it being broken? If you have a temporary fix in place so that it doesn’t look broken, can you please temporarily disable this fix so that I can see the broken text or content in person? I will try to identify the exact problem and recommend a path forward.

Thanks!
George

[Cindy]

Hi George,

Thank-you for the reply. I have not had a chance to respond because I have been working on the 3rd rebuild of my website. You can read about what happened there in my December thread, but it happened when testing stuff of Geoff B.

My issues started with TEC 4.0. When I upgraded I lost the ability to have paragraphs, words bolded, hyperlinks, bullet points and longer excerpts. All of these were working perfectly and without code ( except to have longer excerpts and get rid of ‘Read more) Ever since the upgrade I have to return to Avada everytime TEC does an update.

I always come to ask for help from TEC first only to be told theme or plugin issue. Avada tells me it is TEC issue. But up until now, they have always worked with me because I get nowhere with TEC support on these issues. Now they have told me they wouldn’t keep doing this. They said this is a TEC issue, and if you don’t help me, then I need to hire a coder.

Up until recently, I have always believed it was an Avada issue. But I now know different. Other themes are having the same issues that are not being addressed. And I can’t blame Avada for getting tired of having to deal with the TEC issue over and over. And I can’t believe I’m the only one. Also reading the link to the post you sent me backed up what Avada has been saying.

In this link from May 11, 2016, Geoff saying that the issue is with Avada and their customization around the paragraphs. Then he says it has been fixed. https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/note-updating-avada-4-0-2/
And then on June 8th, he says YAY to Theme Fusion for fixing it.

Now, I’m seeing your post dated 6/13/16 addressing the issues that I’m having. I tried to move my data into the excerpt meta box, but it did not bring over the hyperlink. Besides that, I import the data in and as soon as my new site is done I will be importing in over 800 events. ( I do curation.) Having to fix them manually would be nuts.

So I have found a possible solution provide by Avada dated 5/25/16:

” For the archive, there are no paragraphs being shown still, however that isn’t coming from the theme.

This is coming from the Events Calendar plugin.
They use the following function which strips out all tags, which is why the paragraphs will not be kept
The same happens on the Twenty Sixteen theme.
$excerpt = wp_trim_words( $excerpt, $excerpt_length, $excerpt_more

I have commented this out for now, so if you check the paragraphs should be shown.
I suggest contacting Events Calendar regarding that. ”

You can read a TEC thread that I started at that time here: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/updated-avada-to-and-now-my-calendar-looks-messed-up/

I think for the end user, it is nice to understand the root of the cause but at the end of the day, we just want it fixed. And when it gets broken after updates then the support staff should have workarounds to give to us like Avada has been doing for me. It is wrong that we have to keep paying someone to write code for basic formatting issues. I was reading that with this new TEC roll out it is all about having a beautiful calendar…or words to that affect. This looks like crap.

For now, I’m trying to find someone to do the code. I’m paying $89 / year for support and to not have this supported is upsetting. And at this point, I’m thinking of backing down to the free version since Avada supports it and the support has been better with Avada for TEC issues until this last round. Then I will spend my $89 on code writers. I would rather not do that. I would rather keep TEC support and get answers.

You can see how my calendar is currently looking here: http://footstepsofwisdom.com/events/?action=tribe_list&tribe_paged=1&tribe_event_display=list

This is an example of how it looked before TEC 4.0 and after each fix that Avada gave me:

Join Esther Hicks channel Abraham (a group of guides from a non-physical dimension) for a workshop. Each workshop is created from the energy and questions of those in attendance.

Abraham teaches “Science of Deliberate Creation”.

All questions are welcome.

Discover More: Abraham – Hicks (The “Discover more” is bolded and a different color. The “Abraham-Hicks” is the part that is hyperlinked)

I appreciate you reaching out to me and truly hope you will have news for me that will be welcome.

Kind regards,

Cindy Belz

[George]

Thanks for the reply, Cindy.

The Events Calendar 4.0 is outdated at this point, and the current version is 4.4.1.

What I would encourage you to do is the following:

1. Update your site’s version of WordPress itself to version 4.7.2 if it is not already.

2. Update your site’s version of The Events Calendar to its current version, which is currently 4.4.1.

3. Update your site’s version of Events Calendar Pro its current version, which is currently also 4.4.1.

↑ If issues persist after doing these steps, please share a link to specific events and URLs on your site where the issues are visible. I will take a look at those and help from there.

— George

[Cindy]

Hey George,

I don’t know what you are talking about. I haven’t had 4.0 since the spring when TEC changes toasted the paragraphs, etc…

And I have and have had the most current version of WP.

Here is a link to screenshots showing that I’m updated and I’ve been updated: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ros3HM9hF9zNWIoSi4UTGmTPU6t7P1uAq_hLn_R6PsU/edit?usp=sharing

Here is the link that currently shows everything smashed together, frontend not showing hyperlink, etc…

I’m hoping that by tonight or tomorrow, the person I am now paying to fix the issue will have it looking correct. In case you don’t see this prior I’ve added screenshots of what there is now to the Google doc above.

[George]

Thanks for confirming these details, Cindy. Can you share links to specific events and URLs on your site where the issues are visible? I will take a look at those and help from there.

There is link to specific events or URLs on your site in your reply — I do see screenshots in the Google Doc, but unfortunately looking at screenshots will not be very helpful for me here. I need to see the whole web pages firsthand to see what’s happening.

Thanks for your continued patience and persistence,
George

[Cindy]

I use the items view so they are all messed up. Every one of them.

You can see how my calendar is currently looking here at this link until the coder fixes them. He has said that will be done in a few hours.

http://footstepsofwisdom.com/events/?action=tribe_list&tribe_paged=1&tribe_event_display=list

After that you will have to use the screenshots that show that there are no paragraphs, hyperlinks, bolding, etc…

[Cindy]

I just found out from coder he won’t be able to work on this until tomorrow so hopeful you will be able to see what I’m talking about.

[George]

Thanks for sharing that information Cindy.

Okay, you say that in the items view (which I think is the “List View”) that every item is messed up.

Here is a screenshot of one specific item in that view, for reference and so that we can be talking about the same exact thing (click for a larger-sized image):

☝️ What is it about this item that is “messed up”, specifically? Describe what you expect to be happening with the display of this item, compared to what is actually happening with the display of this item.

Thanks,
George

[Cindy]

That example, like all the others does not display full text which is not that much. And on the ones it does show full text paragraphs are smashed together, no bullets, no bold fonts, no hyperlinks, not able to use color. Just like you wrote about in your document from 6/16 when you explained that changes were made that has affected the appearance.

At this point I’m all good so take a look now. I just paid a Fiverr guy to fix it and in about a day he got it done by putting PHP code in the child theme. Says it won’t break again but if it does to let him know. Here is what he did so others that have same issues as me, have a solution. And if anyone needs help w/coding stuff I’ve included the name of the Fiverr guy because he rocked it!

logicdigger ( name of Fiverr guy)
You should you child theme to save changes from updates . we have edited theme -> tribe-events -> list -> single-event.php and theme -> tribe-events -> single-event.php

Yes in child theme you can find single-event.php

location 1 on avada child -> tribe-events -> list -> single-event.php
location 2 on avada child -> tribe-events -> single-event.php

Replace line number 68 code <?php // echo tribe_events_get_the_excerpt( null, wp_kses_allowed_html( ‘post’ ) ); ?>
with

<?php the_content(); ?>

in theme-> tribe-events->list-> single-events.php

its fixed no any css changes we have made

yes it will never break you can ping me if any issues in future – Warm regards

[George]

Glad to hear you’ve made progress, Cindy.

I’ll close up this issue for now since you have successfully modified your theme.

Please be sure to make backups of your theme and plugins so that you do not lose this custom code, which can happen if you auto-update your theme from inside your wp-admin.

Best of luck with your site!
George

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