THANK YOU!!!! How to bulk show on google maps?

[Cappy]

This plugin is wonderfully awesome! You have no idea how much time and money you have saved our nonprofit. Thank you SO SO SO MUCH! Also, thank you for having a category option. The facebook importer badly needs this feature as well.

Just one question. Is there anyway to bulk select the show on google maps check mark? I imported dozens of events, but it seems I have to go in an turn them on one at a time? Still quicker than importing everything manually!

[George]

Woot! Thanks for the kind words @cappy, very glad to hear our plugins have been of such use for you and your site. Awesome.

As for your question, there’s unfortunately no way for bulk-selecting this option in the admin of the site – however, your import files might have an option for this that you can edit in the file itself, so that upon import each event with that edit just automatically gets the option checked.

I want to be clear that this only might be possible – don’t want to get your hopes up! But if possible, can you copy and paste the contents of one of your import files, for example, into a Gist at http://gist.github.com/ and then share a link back to that Gist in this thread? Don’t worry about the length of the file or anything like that, just copy and paste it in full into a Gist and we can take a look at the import file format to see if something like what I mentioned above is possible.

Thanks in advance for doing this if you’re able to!

George

P.S.
The addition of categories to the Facebook Importer is actually some great feedback, and something that I know is on our radar. Keep your eyes out for updates in the future and read the “Changelog” for each update, you never know what might make its way into a plugin update 😉

[Cappy]

Hi George,

I am not savvy enough to know where those import files would be. I actually though all the data would end up in a database somewhere. Could you explain where I would find the import files?

Thank you!

[Cappy]

Actually, when I checked the boxes, it didn’t work because the import puts the location in the title of the venue, and not in the address of the venue. In other words, there is no address for google maps to find because it is in the title of the venue field. For example, this is the venue title field of one of the imports.

“The Roxburghe Hotel, 38 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh EH2 4HQ, United Kingdom”

And the address fields are blank.

[George]

Hey Cappy,

To import into The Events Calendar, you need to select the file for import – what files are you using? You should be able to open these files on your computer, copy the contents and paste them into a Gist at http://gist.github.com.

If this doesn’t seem possible given the import files you have or other reasons, no worries, it was just an idea to take a look at the files and see what can be done here.

However, if your venue imports are not even importing the address data into the correct fields, the files themselves may not be properly formatted for importing and there’s unfortunately nothing we can do on our end to work around that.

Let me know if you think you can paste some import file contents into a Gist – if not, no worries, but I do have to bear the bad news that there would be little else we can do here 🙁 Our importers only work with CSV files that have columns whose contents can be mapped to Event fields (or Organizer fields, or Venue fields, etc.).

Thank you!
George

[Cappy]

Hi George,

Sorry, I didn’t realize those were actually files. I thought they were links to another databases. I am using a google calendar link to a file. Does google not format their dates correctly? What demarkation does your import look for? Maybe I can do a search and replace with googles demarkations?

This is how it looks in their file.

LOCATION:City Winery Napa\, 1030 Main Street\, Napa\, CA 94559\, United States

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/3h7pevlckf3smn25bv00mjjjh8%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

[George]

Hey Cappy,

Thanks for elaborating on your import source.

I am so, so sorry here because I think I totally misunderstood your question! I’m so sorry Cappy!

I think what you mean is that you’re using the new iCal Importer plugin to import events from that link you shared – correct?

This plugin is still brand new, so I literally just thought you meant that you were importing files via the manual “Events > Import” page in our plugin, which has been around for a while.

I’m very, very sorry about my confusion here, it’s quite embarrassing. Let me know exactly what you mean by “importing” and I promise you I’ll actually be helpful here 🙂

Are you importing that link with the new iCal Importer plugin?

— George

[Cappy]

Hi George,

Yes, I am using the brand new ical importer plugin:) Sorry about the confusion. I am not as geeky as I’d like to think I am. 🙂

[George]

Hey @Cappy,

You have nothing to apologize for here! Thank you so much for your patience and for being cool about my mixup there, I’m really sorry about that but am glad we’ve finally narrowed down some of these.

I unfortunately am compelled to apologize yet again because neither of your problems here are to be met with good news:

• For your original question about there being a bulk “Show Google Map” method, the answer to this is still unfortunately “no” at this time. You have to manually check that option 🙁

• For your question about the address information being pulled into Venue titles, this is also unfortunately a problem we’ve been pulling our hair out about for some time. The problem is that the .ics file format does not really allow us to grep for that address information in such a way that we can then structure it correctly and pass it along to “Venues” as address info. I looked up some information on this and found the following summary of why this happens from one of our developers Mat:

I ran some tests and I believe this issue stems from the way the ical feed comes in.
Basically there is no proper address data which is part of an ical feed so there is no way to populate the venue’s location properly.
When we do get a location from the feed we use it as the venues name but we do not add an address to the venue. [emphasis mine]

Once an address is added to the venue manually this event then shows on the map view.

I went back over the logs and it appears we spent a fair amount of time trying to come up with a solution for this and eventually we decided there is no safe consistent way to handle the location data except just to use as the name of the venue.

I’m really sorry about the limitation with this, and for my delay in arriving at this bad news.

It seems that, while the iCal Importer does speed up many aspects of this process, the processes of adding Venue data and the “Show Maps Link” are still manual at this time.

But – I brought up this issue with the team and we’re going to give this another bash now that the iCal Importer is officially released. I don’t have any specific launch dates or anything, of course, but we’re discussing some possibilities for an “optional” way to pull in that Venue data from .ics files. This way, since it’s hard to do that consistently, if it fails for users they can easily disable it and just keep doing it manually, but there will at least be an option to try having the Venue data pulled in for some venues which will work for some users.

I want to keep apologizing for the inconveniences here but won’t, if anything just to prevent this reply from dragging on longer 🙂 Please let me know if there’s anything I can help with further here, any questions / comments / concerns whatsoever. Also, if you bought your iCal Importer license recently enough and want a refund based on the information I shared here, that’s fine too – just shoot an email to [email protected] with a copy of your original iCal Importer purchase receipt and we’ll refund it immediately.

Thanks @Cappy,
George

[Cappy]

Hi George,

Thank you for that very detailed explanation. After looking at the file, I see what you mean. Sometimes the location is just city and state, and other times it is venue name, address, city, state, and there are no additional demarcations to separate empty fields.

Since it seems that google maps can usually find the location even in the one line format, is it possible to have the plugin look at the address fields, and if they are empty, use the data in the venue title to map the location? Just a thought. Anyway, cleaning up hundreds of venues is still better than entering them all from scratch.

[George]

That’s an interesting thought Cappy, and an idea we can definitely play around with. For now, something like that wouldn’t be possible here, but keep your eyes out for future updates and read the update changelogs! We’re working on it! 🙂

Thanks again for being so cool about this limitation – I’m glad you’re still able to find the importer useful otherwise. The offer for a refund still stands, you have until 30 days from your original purchase to act on it and no hard feelings if so!

Thanks a ton Cappy – I’ll close up this thread for now but if you have other questions, concerns, etc., don’t hesitate to open a new thread any time.

Gratefully,
George

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