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I’m sorry you’re hitting up against difficulties, Brian: would it be possible to get a link to a live example of the problem, even if that is only on a basic test site?
Hi Christopher,
Thanks for posting – and I’m sorry to hear you’ve hit up against a few hurdles.
I do need to point out first of all that we try hard to stick to one issue per forum topic. This helps to keep topics focused, besides making it easier for us to deliver fair and fast service to all of our customers 🙂
I was hoping to get the weekly calendar to appear on the home/holding page while I sort out the rest of the site.
One existing tool at your disposal are our event widgets. These can be added on almost any page and there are a couple of points I’d like to highlight about their use that are sometimes forgotten:
- They don’t need to live in sidebar areas (though it is certainly possible to register extra sidebar areas within a theme) – you can use a WordPress template tag called the_widget() to add them almost anywhere you like
- If they don’t contain enough information, contain too much information or you need to tweak them to look like one of the primary event views, you can! Like all our views they are fully customizable
Beyond this, some third party tools like this one contain facilities that will let you set a view like week view as the front page of your blog.
Another and probably more devastating issue I am having is that when I try to go to the calendar using the “Where’s my calendar? Right here.” link in general settings for the plugin I get a 404 page.
In the first instance can you try visiting Settings → Permalinks – just visiting this screen (you need not change anything) should clear and reset some rules used by WordPress to route requests and may resolve the problem.
If that doesn’t help, can I ask you to run through our standard troubleshooting steps and create a new topic for further assistance?
Thanks!
Hi Neil 🙂
Ordinarily the hour, minute and meridiem selector will indeed display on the same line as one another.
Perhaps your theme’s CSS/other customizations have gotten in the way of this? Unfortunately though I’m unable to view your submission form as it’s currently behind a login.
Hi James,
I’m sorry to hear you’ve hit up against problems.
The first thing to do is visit Events → Settings → Facebook – what is the import frequency setting?
You might find it is set to “weekly”, for instance, in which case the imports are not going to happen too quickly. If that’s the problem, please just adjust to “hourly” or some other appropriate setting instead.
Alternatively, there are those hosting environments where WordPress is unable to run scheduled tasks in the background due to various constraints. Assuming you effectively have a bunch of events queued up on various Facebook pages and they are ready to import (and appear on the manual import page) – try visiting example.com/wp-cron.php – of course, adjust to match your own URL – then, after some minutes, return to the import page.
Were they imported? If so, that might suggest the issue is that your host isn’t really an ideal home for WordPress and some re-configuration needs to take place.
Do either of those ideas help?
Hi Tim,
I was just chatting with Brian (who you are working with in this other topic) and we noticed you are cross-posting a lot of the same replies.
It could definitely be that these problems have a common source (whether a conflict with your theme or something else) but equally it’s important we stay as focused as possible. In this specific case – unless it has now been solved – the problem you raised was with the order of events displaying in the calendar widget, when set to filter things down to a specific category.
Let’s concentrate on that problem here:
- It sounds like you deactivated all other plugins and the problem remained
- When you switched to a default theme the widget disappeared: what you would need to do here is visit Appearance → Widgets after changing the theme and restore it – can you confirm if you were able to do this, or else give it a try now?
- In your last few replies you don’t mention the original issue (with ordering of events in the calendar widget) at all – with that in mind, can you confirm it is indeed still an active problem?
Please also bear in mind that you do not necessarily have to test on your live site, you could create a test site and so avoid disruption to your live site.
Again, I’m sorry you’re having a rough time of it and we’re here to help – but if possible let’s stay focused on no more than one issue for each support topic you create.
Thanks!
Hi Jay,
With regards to the RSS feeds – this turns out to be a known bug and one that will be fixed once the next release goes out. Would it be possible for you to deactivate the dashboard widget in question (via Screen Options) until this is resolved in a future version of The Events Calendar?
The key validation server itself may be indeed be caused by a firewall-related issue – and what I’m going to do next of all is ask my colleague Brian to step in as he has been working on a set of related issues along these lines.
That aside, something puzzling is the issue with the event editor loading slowly. I can’t bring to mind any reasons why The Events Calendar/Events Calendar PRO by themselves would “dial home” or even attempt to access any external URLs in that scenario, so it’s possible this is in fact a separate and unrelated problem. Does this only occur in the event editor and does it also impact single, non-recurring events?
Thanks again for your patience, Jay – and Brian will be along to help further with the key validation issues.
Thanks Craig, looks like a bug in our forum software removed the hyphens from those URLs – apologies on that count.
I tried swapping to Twenty Fourteen and de-activating other plugins. I still get no joy.
Would it be possible to re-visit this point?
I see that you have a custom tribe-events.css stylesheet within your theme folder and I notice two things about this:
- The first and most important is that if I block this stylesheet from loading, week view renders nicely and the events are visible – this is a strong indication that the problem lies in your theme and with this stylesheet specifically
- The second is that the same stylesheet is being added twice, which is pretty odd … the duplicate link has an ID which is prefixed “swm-“: this makes me think it was added by the theme vendor (Soft Web Media) and that the fact it is duplicated makes me think they are perhaps doing something incorrectly
However, the really odd thing is that it sounds like you found there was still a problem even when you switched to Twenty Fourteen. Unless you (or someone working on your behalf) had modified your copy of Twenty Fourteen I’m not really sure why that would be, but it’s worth looking into.
Since it looks like your site is currently in development and not generally accessible, could you temporarily switch it back to Twenty Fourteen (and deactivate all other plugins, leaving only ours) so I can take a look at week view in that state in case something else is at play besides the issues with your current theme?
Thanks!
Well, I think that varies according to the hosting environment (things like execution and socket timeouts are configurable, though some hosts may place an upper limit on them or indeed may not allow them to be modified at all).
In the short term all I can suggest is working with your hosting provider to eliminate any such restrictions – though, again, it may be that’s not practical or that – even if the limits are raised – you may find 1,300 FB pages is simply too high to be handled unless those caps are removed altogether.
On our end the challenge is whether to re-engineer the plugin to support something like the number of IDs you wish to deal with or, perhaps, to start setting expectations about the number of pages that can be imported within a ‘typical’ hosting setup.
Since we’re still giving further consideration to this there unfortunately isn’t much more I can tell you, but perhaps by working with your host you can get some kind of short term relief?
Hi Dillon,
That’s certainly possible!
For the avoidance of any doubt though I’d stress it won’t behave this way “out of the box”, so some theming know-how would be required to create a comparable layout (and to pull the events into a different template, if you don’t wish to use one of our existing views).
So, in short, yes – you can do this! It will need some development knowledge to execute on it, though 🙂
OK, thanks for the additional information.
So there are a lot of variables that could be relevant here (I don’t for instance know how much traffic your site is in receipt of or what sort of shape that takes) but the problem could be as simple as this: perhaps your hosting package lacks the “oomph” required to support your needs.
Note that – if it is the same hosting package I think it is – it is distinct from the range of VPS offerings sold by the same vendor. This suggests to me that, essentially, it is a traditional shared hosting package and many websites other than those you control are competing for the same resources.
A VPS could also be considered “shared hosting” but it isn’t often described that way since the degree of isolation it offers is far superior to traditional shared hosting.
With that in mind, one option I would like to table is that you review and modify your hosting arrangements: perhaps you could migrate to a VPS package (whether with the same vendor or a different one) or perhaps you could try out some shared hosting packages from other vendors – some will out-perform others and it may be that your current setup just isn’t a good fit for your project.
Testing out other providers and packages by paying for a month’s trial with a selection of them is of course going to mean a small investment of time and money, but it could be well worth it.
I’d prefer to get your opinion before moving forward to install another plugin, especially one in beta.
While it’s experimental in nature nonetheless it should be safe to activate and – in the event there are any problems (though I wouldn’t suggest using it if I thought the risk was high or even moderate) – you should be able to deactivate it again without difficulty.
When in effect it should facilitate a marked reduction in work done querying for events. It is of course completely up to you whether you give this a try now or perhaps explore other hosting options first of all – or indeed take up both those options concurrently.
If you have further questions please let me know – also, if you follow either of the suggested paths (changing your hosting setup and/or activating the provided plugin), we’d love to hear how it works out for you 🙂
Thanks!
Thanks, that gives us a better idea of what you’re trying to achieve here.
In the short term, our next release should see a set of improvements (though they may not in themselves be sufficient to accommodate your goals), looking further ahead I’ll certainly log an issue to investigate better ways of handling this.
That is odd – the events category view should use essentially the same template/layout as the regular events page and that clearly isn’t happening.
I will try but I have a feeling they won’t assist. So far I have had to solve all of the problems (and there have been many) on my own.
I do sympathize – but neither problem are things we see widespread reports of, which tends to suggest they are specific to your site.
The suggested troubleshooting steps can help to determine if the cause is a conflict and – in order to avoid disruption to your live site – remember that you can also perform them on a duplicate staging site, or, you can create a fresh WordPress installation in a sub-directory and essentially perform the same steps in reverse: start with only our plugins and incrementally add the rest (and ultimately the same theme) as you have on your live site.
The last thing we want is for you to feel you are solving problems without help, but the difficulty in some situations – like this one – is that if we cannot replicate the problem ourselves then we really depend on your assistance in troubleshooting things locally we are otherwise unable to do on your behalf.
…Sorry I missed one of your questions: communication is via ports 80 and 443, nothing else should be needed (in relation to key validation, our RSS feeds etc).
It certainly seems that there are connectivity issues specifically with our server. Can I ask you (or one of your hosting team) to provide some more information about your hosting environment, as requested in my last reply?
Is there anything further you can tell me about your hosting setup in terms of how many sites it hosts, which operating system is in use and any details about available memory, etc?
This and any other details (such as the web server that is in use) could all be useful since most users are completely unaffected by these issues. It would be great if we could identify any commonality between those who are impacted.
Thanks!
