Update Past Events in Bulk

[Hyla Crane]

Hi – we have repeat events each year – just with different dates and times. When I use the csv file I used last year and just change the dates to new ones, it duplicates the event. And then the ticket uploads are attaching the tickets to the old events instead of the new ones.
How can I bulk upload to update the past events with the new dates and not have them duplicated?
I have attached the file layouts we used last year to upload in bulk.

[Sky]

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. I will try to help with your question.

I’m not sure trying to update past events would be the way to go here. In Events > Settings > General there are settings that allow you to delete old events after x amount of time. I would delete the old events and import new ones for each year if there is confusion with them.

To make sure I understand the process you are going through:

1) you are importing a csv of events from last year. When you say that you are “changing the dates,” are you doing so in the WordPress interface, or in the CSV file before importing?

2) What do you mean by “and then the ticket uploads are attaching the tickets to the old events instead of the new ones?” Are you manually adding tickets to the newly imported events, or are you importing them some other way?

Thanks,
Sky

[Hyla Crane]

Hi – thanks for your response.

To answer your questions:

1. We are going into the CSV file and changing the dates

2. We upload tickets via a CSV file as well. When I uploaded the tickets
with revised dates, they attached to the old events instead of the new
ones.

[Sky]

Hi again,

Thank you for the additional information.

The tickets will be associated with a particular event through the event name and date, unless the id is specified. Every WordPress post must have a unique id, so when duplicating a post, the copy will be given a new id. You would need to associate the tickets with the new ids in the CSV import. To find the id of an event in WordPress, navigate to the admin single event edit page. The post id will be in the page URL like so post.php?post=4789 following “post=”.

So in this circumstance, I guess I see why you might want to just update the original dates, so the ids don’t change. The event imports also go by name and date. So, unfortunately, when using our import tool if you are trying to change the name or date, it will wind up creating a new event instead of updating the old one.

You can see examples of how to import CSV files for the various post types in our plugins on this page: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/csv-files-options-and-examples/

You might also check out the WP All Import plugin. It works great for bulk uploading and updating items in the WordPress database. You may be able to identify the events just based on name and update the event date meta fields.

Hope that helps! Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Thanks,
Sky

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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