Time Incorrect & Scheduled Import Won't Run

[Katie Dahl]

Hey there- I am having two issues with the aggregator; I am importing an iCal feed:

1. If I do a 1-time import, my events are pulled in, but the time is 4 hours off (they appear 4 hours ahead of when the are supposed to). I have my WordPress settings are set to the correct time zone (Eastern Standard).

2. If I try to schedule a recurring import of the same iCal feed (daily), I click preview & then the spinner just keeps turning and nothing ever comes up.

Here is the iCal feed I am using: https://solutions.acstechnologies.com/crm/events/160997/main-calendar.ics/

[Andras]

Hi Katie,

Thanks for reaching out!

I’m sorry to hear about the issues with importing. Let me try to help you with this.

Can you edit an event that is imported and check what the timezone of that event is? Is it UTC like on this screenshot?

I tried scheduling the feed and managed. It took some time to get the preview generated with the 200+ events but it’s there.

Did you manually import it the first time? If yes, are the events still there or did you delete them. If deleted, then did you also remove them from the ‘Ignored’ list?

Thanks and cheers,
Andras

[Andras]

Hello again Katie,

I did some further digging and had a chat with a team member on this.

It looks like that the source of the feed doesn’t have a timezone defined, and all times are present in the UTC timezone.

Here’s an example:

SUMMARY:Classic Worship
DTSTAMP:20171026T195339Z
DTSTART:20170924T121500Z
DTEND:20170924T131500Z

The ‘Z’ at the end marks that the date and time is in UTC format, which is 4 hours ahead of New York.

The proper formatting for New York would be something like this:

 DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20170924T081500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20170924T091500

This is something that you will need to change at the source.

I hope this helps with the time difference issue.

Andras

[Katie Dahl]

Well, that is super annoying (the source that provides the feed, not you guys)… I just got off the phone with the software company that generates this feed for us, and they say there isn’t a way for them to change it from UTC (what!?).

Is there anyway that we can make a change to the Events Calendar plugin, that would allow us to automatically subtract those 4 hours? (long shot, but I am out of options).

[Andras]

Hi Kaite,

Sorry to hear about that. Indeed that can be very annoying.

I just checked the test import I set up yesterday and there might be a solution. Here’s what I have:

1. The events are imported with the UTC timezone. (screenshot)

2. WordPress timezone set to New York. (screenshot)

3. TEC timezone under Events > Settings >  General tab set to ‘sitewide’. (screenshot)

B/c of the last setting, all the event times will be shown what they would be in the New York timezone. So if an event is in UTC (point 1) it will be converted to the wp timezone.

And here is a screenshot of the end result showing it with the correct time on the frontend.

Check this and let me know if it works for you as well.

After changing some timezone settings then an ‘Update timezone info’ button might appear at the TEC timezone settings. Click on it.

If this doesn’t work then we can try to work out something else.

Cheers,
Andras

[Katie Dahl]

Glory, Hallelujah! That worked!! THANK YOU

SO

MUCH!!!!!

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by Katie Dahl.

[Andras]

Katie, I’m so happy to hear that helped! Awesome.

I would like to flag one thing, that just came to my mind. Summer time.

The ‘New York’ time in the WP settings takes DST into account and will handle that.

UTC however is a ‘fixed’ timezone which doesn’t care about DST. So in the summer New York is UTC – 4 hours, but in winter it is UTC – 5 hours. So that might influence the times that are shown on the website.

If this is / will be the case then you can try setting your WP timezone to UTC-4 instead of ‘New York’, and that should fix this.

Since this is resolved I am going to close this ticket, but if you need anything else related to this topic or another please create a new ticket and we’ll be happy to help you out.

Cheers,
Andras

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https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/the-events-calendar/
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