Upgraded to 3.5.1 and it duplicated all my events!?

[garethjmsaunders]

I’ve just upgraded to the latest version (3.5.1) and now all my events have been duplicated up to 12 times each. I had about 20 pages of events, now I have 212.

It was all looking fine before I upgraded. I’m really not happy!

[Barry]

Hi: I’m sorry you hit difficulties after upgrading.

I visited what I think is your site (can I ask you to confirm the URL? The one in the field provided doesn’t seem to be valid, which may be due to a forum bug stripping out hyphens, so I tried adding one in the middle and did reach what I suspect is your website) but didn’t see much in the way of duplicate events.

If you could confirm that would be awesome.

Thanks!

[garethjmsaunders]

Thanks, the site is at: http://www.allsaints-standrews.org.uk/events/

And there are now no duplicate entries because I’ve just spent the last two and a half hours manually deleting every event in the calendar, because we’re approaching Holy Week and we need to have service times on the website. So I’m starting again.

I’m so exhausted, it’s 01:35 in the morning and I need to get this live by the morning, and then I’ve got work to go to. I’m really disappointed. I know I should have tested it but I was in a hurry.

[garethjmsaunders]

I’m really not having a good time with this! I’ve just spent the last hour creating a CSV file to import this month’s events… imported successfully except for the last three events and then I discover that you guys use American format dates not UK. So 12/04/2014 isn’t seen as 12 April but 04 December. *sigh!* *weep!*

[Barry]

I’m really sorry you’re having so many problems.

The original issue looks like it may be one that has affected a number of users and we’re working hard to produce a fix: when you update we need to modify an amount of recurring event data to keep things running nicely and it looks as if, in some hosting environments, that process doesn’t complete and is triggered a second, third time etc.

Please bear with us and we’ll have a fix out as soon as we can.

If you feel comfortable editing code, we do have a possible fix we can supply you with in the interim – just let me know if you want to explore that.

I discover that you guys use American format dates not UK. So 12/04/2014 isn’t seen as 12 April but 04 December. *sigh!* *weep!*

That would definitely be frustrating. Like WordPress itself our plugin sits on top of the PHP runtime which handles the actual interpretation of dates here. It does support UK style dates but (while I appreciate this may not be common practice in real life) it requires hyphens as separators rather than forward slashes. For example:

04-02-14
dd-mm-yy

This would be 4th February 2014 rather than 2nd April 2014. A large number of formats are supported though and you might find ISO 8601 style dates to be the clearest in these situations, ie:

2014-02-04
yyyy-mm-dd

I hope that helps and our apologies for all the inconvenience you’ve been having along the way.

[garethjmsaunders]

Hi Barry, thank you for your prompt and honest answer re. the issue with duplicated events. In a way, I’m glad that it wasn’t just me. But I’m sorry for you guys because the Events Calendar has been a pretty solid and valuable plugin for me over the last year. I do wish you well in getting to the bottom of the issue.

Thank you for the heads-up on the date format for the CSV file. I’ve said this before, and I think it’s worth saying again, it would REALLY useful if the plugin shipped with three example CSV files for venues, organisers and events which gave suggested heading rows, and some sample data so we could see what formats to use, etc. These wouldn’t add terribly much to the overall download size. Please…

I know I sounded all cross when I posted. And I was. But despite having to stay up until about 03:00 to get this fixed, I did get to catch up with a couple of shows on BBC iPlayer (on demand TV), so it wasn’t all bad. And this purge of historical events has allowed me to start again.

Thanks for your support and your apologies. Much appreciated. First class support!

(I work as the web architect at the University of St Andrews, and currently spend about 60% of my time on first, second and third line support, so I appreciate how demanding it can be.)

Gareth

[Leah]

Thanks for your comments here Gareth. We really appreciate hearing this. Thank you for your support!

Best,
Leah

[Author]

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