Why can't I add Multiple Facebook Events to Calendar of my choosing anymore?

[ctaintsobad]

How can I import multiple facebook links at a time into Aggregator. With the old way I would put like 20-30 Facebook URL in there at a time and the events would all pull up and I would checkmark the ones I wanted to put on the calendar. Now I have to put one Facebook URL at a time and then there’s no way to select individual events with a checkmark. See image below…
Is there a way through CSV/Excel?

Please help!

[Geoff]

Hi @ctaintsobad,

Thanks for writing in — these are great questions, so let’s dig in!

Event Aggregator is built around the idea that you can create scheduled imports for each source you are importing from. So, while the previous Facebook Events add-on did indeed allow you to specify multiple Facebook feeds at a time, it was not very conducive for creating scheduled imports and we found that importing from multiple URLs at a single time did not scale very well, causing crashes and timeouts.

That said, you can still import from multiple Facebook URLs in Event Aggregator. The difference is that you will set each one up as a separate scheduled import.

Now I have to put one Facebook URL at a time and then there’s no way to select individual events with a checkmark.

Checkboxes are only displayed for one-time imports. The idea here is that if you are importing from Facebook on a one-time basis, then you are likely interested in importing specific events from that Facebook account. Here’s a screenshot of a one-time import where the checkboxes are displayed.

However, if you are doing a scheduled import, the idea there is that you want to import all events on a regular basis. As such, there is no checkbox for selecting specific events. Even if a checkbox was displayed, Event Aggregator would still be unable to determine which events you want to import on a scheduled basis because the list of events would change as new events are added to the Facebook account.

What you can do instead is set scheduled imports to be set as Draft before being published. That would allow you to remove any imported events before they are published to the calendar.

Is there a way through CSV/Excel?

Absolutely! It’s the first option in the Import options:

Does this help answer your questions? Please let me know. 🙂

Cheers!
Geoff

[ctaintsobad]

Geoff by the last question, is there CSV/Excel option I was asking if there is a way to import an excel/CSV specifically for the Facebook URL and Schedule/Manual Import options, e.g.

COLUMN HEADING | 1: Facebook URL
ROW 1 DATA | http:tribelink.com/facebook_url_1

COLUMN HEADING | 2: Scheduled (S) / Manual (M)
ROW 1 DATA | S

Etc.

Where we can use an excel database to quickly add all that info.

[Geoff]

Hi @ctaintsobad, and thanks for following up!

The CSV option is not specific to Facebook URL, but allows you to import events based on the data you extract from Facebook. In other words, it will not distinguish between where an event is being imported from because the source of the import is the CSV file itself and it contains all the data it needs to create the events.

And, to be a little more clear, importing from CSV is not a scheduled import but meant for one-time imports.

Cheers!
Geoff

[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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