[Barry]

Hi Jason,

No problem about the delay.

What’s strange is we aren’t seeing widespread reports along these lines and we can also see live examples of feeds that do import as expected into Google Calendar (such as our demo site, WP Shindig). What’s also odd is if I capture your feed in a file and make it accessible via a test server, Google imports it as expected.

Why exactly there is this difference, I’m not sure (line endings follow the normal pattern, etc) – but in the absence of any obvious indicators running through our standard troubleshooting steps is worth a shot here – it’s possible some other component is interfering in some subtle way.

Could you give that a go?

[Barry]

Hi Jason,

Some curious results there.

The feed itself appears to be valid but I see what you mean (and there is definitely a curious difference between adding it as a URL and importing a local copy manually).

Am I right in thinking this is your staging site? Is the calendar currently deployed on the live site, too, and does the same problem manifest itself with the iCal URLs provided there?

[Barry]

Hi Neill,

On the search side of things I imagine there are quite a few options out there – the official plugin directory could again be a good place to begin searching – and there may be other options made available by commercial vendors, too.

I hope that helps – and good luck with the project 🙂

[Barry]

Hi Neill,

Interesting stuff.

You’re right that this largely falls out of what we would generally provide support for, but I’ll be happy to offer what guidance I can.

Recurring events seem to create a new event each year, rather than one entry. This would be bad for SEO and duplicate content, is there a way to change this? I read in the support area about canonical urls to control it, but I didn’t fully understand how this would work.

I guess there are a few ways you might tackle this and a canonical URL could certainly be a part of that – whereby for all recurring events you specify a single page as – in a sense – the “master” which should be indexed by search engines. This might be the /all/ events page.

With some slight wizardry, you could alternatively or additionally override links to single recurring event posts so that they all point to the /all/ page (or just to the next upcoming event).

2. If I search for any of these related entries using a standard WordPress search box, nothing appears, I assume that is due to the custom fields used. Is there a solution?

I’d need a little more detail – are you searching for data contained outside of the event title/description, here? It is certainly true that things such as the event categories and any additional fields are not indexed (by default).

3. When creating normal blog articles about subjects, I would like to be able to associate them with the venue in Events Calendar. For example, I write an article on Ferraris at Monza, I would like to be able to tag the venue so that it appears under the venue page.

Perhaps something like Posts 2 Posts could give you a head start on this?

4. Does anyone have any suggestions on a good business directory plugin that might integrate with Events Calendar? For example, to offer specialist services / accommodation etc in the vicinity of a venue. That way, people buying a directory entry will have their entry appear in a useful, contextual way.

I’m afraid I don’t have any particular recommendations here, but if other members of the community do they are welcome to chip in – beyond that I can only suggest researching existing offerings 🙂

Thanks!

[Barry]

Hi Rosa,

I’m sorry to hear that you’re facing some difficulties.

When you try to load the next month’s events (in that widget) a bad response is coming back, which points to a fatal error:

Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 77824 bytes) in /.../plugins/backwpup/inc/class-destination-sugarsync.php

Despite what this says it isn’t necessarily the case that you lack sufficient memory, as such, though it is definitely a possibility you should consider and increasing the available memory may help (see here or talk to your hosting provider).

However, the fact it only seems to happen following an ajax request – whether in relation to the calendar widget or month view itself – makes me think we may actually be looking at a conflict of some kind, which has this side effect of depleting the available memory.

Trying our standard troubleshooting steps would therefore also be worthwhile, here (starting with your “backwpup” plugin and perhaps looking at its settings in relation to “sugarsync” may be a great starting point).

Let me know how you get on!

[Barry]

I’m a little confused as to what the feature request is asking for now.

Well, in a sense, it’s not much more than a fairly subtle twist on something we already offer.

MS Outlook imports this fine. Google can’t import from this URL though. If I save the ics file that’s generated and put it on a webserver then google is able to import it just fine. Have you guys run into this? Any guidance?

Hmm, that’s strange.

I do have a theory, though, which is that the suggested filename is throwing Google for one reason or another.

There is a small snippet found here that reduces it to a smaller size – could you try adding this to your theme’s functions.php file or some other suitable location and see if that enables importing-buy-URL to work as expected?

function ical_export_filename( $return ) {
    header( 'Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="events.ics"' );
    return $return;
}

add_filter( 'tribe_ical_properties', 'ical_export_filename' )

Let me know if that helps!

[Barry]

Sure – so our Themer’s Guide is the best starting place if you’re unfamiliar with the process of customizing our plugin, and is well worth reading if you have not already done so.

Where exactly you should make the changes is going to depend on where you want to expose links to the iCal feed (bear in mind, you could potentially “hand craft” the links and add them to pages, posts, your nav menu or via the before/after HTML fields we provide, as opposed to coding a solution).

In terms of forming links to the feed itself we do have some helper functions (or “template tags”) such as tribe_get_ical_link() that will provide you with the required URL.

You might decide to change the scheme to webcal:// with some code like this (as one means of hinting that the app should “subscribe”) before displaying it:

$feed = str_replace( 'http://', 'webcal://', tribe_get_ical_link() );
echo '<a href="' . $feed . '">Subscribe to iCal Feed</a>';

That’s a simple example, of course, but hopefully it gives you the basic idea and you can build up from there 🙂

[Barry]

For sure – and that is of course already on our radar having accrued quite a few votes already.

We frequently review all feature requests and – as you can see – the team has decided on this occasion that further votes would be required to move forward on that specific request. We’ll continue to monitor it, though, and will take it forward if we can 🙂

Thanks again for posting and – as you marked this topic “resolved” – I’ll go ahead and close it out.

[Barry]

Hi Jason,

Apologies for what was admittedly a poorly worded initial response. In hindsight, using a term like “consumption” was not a good choice here.

As you’ve essentially highlighted the RFC in question does not really concern itself with whether a user agent performs a one-off import or handles the data as a subscription – the iCal data itself should be the same regardless. Rather, it is concerned with accurately transporting the event data.

Even our custom calendar that we’ve coded that we are trying to replace has an ical feed.

Essentially, we do too 🙂

The iCal export link for the upcoming events list for instance supplies dynamically generated content and it is entirely possible to subscribe to this, in the sense of configuring an app to check in and update its own local copy of events based on this.

Re-purposing this to clearly present it as a feed (and even switching the scheme to webcal://) is readily possible right now with a simple customization or two and perhaps doing so could tide you over until we officially release feed support.

To sum up:

• The validity of our existing iCal output (in relation to the standard described in RFC 5545 and later) is not the problem here
• We do have concerns about the over-all user experience that have stopped us from officially releasing this feature and I am afraid I cannot provide an ETA for final delivery

[Barry]

Hi Jason,

It’s not too easy to do this at present but by adding a snippet like this one (to your theme’s functions.php file, a mu-plugin or some other suitable place) you should be able to get the result you are looking for:

function inc_child_event_cats( $query ) {
	$tax_query = $query->get( 'tax_query' );
	if ( ! is_array( $tax_query ) ) return;

	foreach ( $tax_query as &$single_query ) {
		if ( empty( $single_query[ 'taxonomy' ] ) || Tribe__Events__Main::TAXONOMY !== $single_query[ 'taxonomy' ] )
			continue;

		$single_query[ 'include_children' ] = true;
	}

	$query->set( 'tax_query', $tax_query );
}

add_filter( 'tribe_events_pre_get_posts', 'inc_child_event_cats', 100 );

Do note that this upon adding this snippet the logic (including child categories) will apply to all event queries, not just those where Filter Bar applies its magic – though you could certainly massage it further if needed.

You do raise a good point though, which is that this should be more readily configurable – and I’ll log a feature request for that as it seems like a logical option to offer 🙂

[Barry]

Hi Jason,

Unfortunately, work on this was postponed while we reviewed some differences in the way various apps consume the iCal data as we were reluctant to officially launch a feature that might not work as expected on one or more popular calendar apps.

I’m afraid I cannot offer any guarantees as to when this will be driven to completion and so if you need something in the short term a custom solution is likely to be the best way forward.

[Barry]

Hi Trisha,

That’s definitely possible!

I’m afraid we don’t deliver technical support here in pre-sales but if you can log in and post on our premium forums I’m sure we could provide you with a pointer in the right direction 🙂

If you are not currently a license key holder fear not – you can still post on the wordpress.org forums and see if anyone from the community can assist.

Thanks!

[Barry]

Great 🙂

[Barry]

Hi David,

You could use a similar approach – but instead of looking at and modifying $single_filter[‘html’] you would be interested instead in $single_filter[‘caption’] 🙂

Does that help?

[Barry]

Thanks, David – that definitely provides a little more insight.

So let’s say you want to provide a stronger indication to the user that one or more filters have been applied (following a search). You might use some logic like this to trigger that alert:

if ( is_search() && tribe_is_filtered_request() ) { /* ... */ }

There is no such helper function as tribe_is_filtered_request(), however, so you’d need to build this yourself. Right at this time each filter exists as an anonymous object so trying to obtain information from those objects – such as if they are filtering the query or not – is tricky at best.

Even so, we can look at other variables which are accessible to us and make a pretty good informed guess about which if any filters have been applied.

Here are the different “filter slugs” used by default:

• eventcategory
• cost
• tags
• venues
• organizers
• dayofweek
• timeofday

When a visitor tries to apply these, a new query parameter is added to the URL, in the form tribe_SLUG=xxx. You can use this to try and detect if a filter has been added by looking at the keys of the $_REQUEST or $_GET variables.

Combining this with a little theming work would allow you to put together a suitable alert making it as clear as possible to the user that their search results are subject to a number of still-applied filters.

You could also effectively “disable” the filters by testing to see if they are set during a search, just like we covered, but instead of displaying an alert you could perform a redirect back to the same page (but with the relevant parameters removed from the URL query).

I appreciate this all sounds a little complicated and we’ll certainly consider some changes to make things more customizable going forward.

[Author]

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