[center4aging]

Hi Jamie,

Happy holidays!

Couldn’t understand the working so put aside the project to use WP All Imports with Event Calendar Pro Import for now.

I ended up manually configuring recurring events after the initial import by Event Calendar. I have to say that the options presented by the UI is very robust, easy to understand and was able to handle different recurring settings/patterns which is impressive. Result is initially imported about 350 events and after a two day marathon on configuring the recurring events, the events are up to 7900 (1/1/2018 – 12/31/2018 for the most part).

My two yens – I mean cents: Part of the two day marathon configuration was waiting. Early on I found out that although the page says I can move away from the page while the events are created/updated, there were occasions that it wasn’t the case. So I made sure to wait until it completed. For weekly recurring that meant upwards of 52 new events. Not slow as molasses but even then for the server to update ~320 events and cumulatively the process adds up in our case.

Going forward monthly new recurring events will be an average of ~40 so the “import & manual update process” is still not a trivial thing (I use “not trivial” in the sense of “time” it takes to accomplish this task monthly; again robust interface/options helps). If future functionality of “import” is given super powers to take all possible recurring patterns as it currently exists in the UI, it will be nirvana 😉

Thanx for all the communication on this topic. At the end we couldn’t automate the recurring, even with the use of a third party plugin, but when all said & done we launched the website this morning so chalk up another production site using your Event calendar related products 😉 This site is huge as 8 different cities are collaborating to bring one stop information consumption (aggregated but searchable) in one location!

With gratitude,
Tak

[center4aging]

Hi Barry and/or Andras,

Happy Holidays!

Below is a partial copy & paste from the other related thread I had going with Jamie.

Wanted to thank you for the replies in this thread. I’ll be looking forward to improvements that Andras talked about above (and hopefully others) in the “import” functionality!

With gratitude,
Tak

P.S. I have couple other general questions but I’ll just start a new thread so subject is not off-topic.

“I ended up manually configuring recurring events after the initial import by Event Calendar. I have to say that the options presented by the UI is very robust, easy to understand and was able to handle different recurring settings/patterns which is impressive. Result is initially imported about 350 events and after a two day marathon on configuring the recurring events, the events are up to 7900 (1/1/2018 – 12/31/2018 for the most part).

My two yens – I mean cents: Part of the two day marathon configuration was waiting. Early on I found out that although the page says I can move away from the page while the events are created/updated, there were occasions that it wasn’t the case. So I made sure to wait until it completed. For weekly recurring that meant upwards of 52 new events. Not slow as molasses but even then for the server to update ~320 events and cumulatively the process adds up in our case.

Going forward monthly new recurring events will be an average of ~40 so the “import & manual update process” is still not a trivial thing (I use “not trivial” in the sense of “time” it takes to accomplish this task monthly; again robust interface/options helps). If future functionality of “import” is given super powers to take all possible recurring patterns as it currently exists in the UI, it will be nirvana 😉

Thanx for all the communication on this topic. At the end we couldn’t automate the recurring, even with the use of a third party plugin, but when all said & done we launched the website this morning so chalk up another production site using your Event calendar related products 😉 This site is huge as 8 different cities are collaborating to bring one stop information consumption (aggregated but searchable) in one location!”

[center4aging]

Thanx Andras.

On the recurring events: after CSV importing the first of the series for “an” event, I go in and manually apply the recurring rules via wp-admin. Tedious but since I didn’t comprehend the use & custom scripting necessary to make Event Calendar & WP All Import plugins work, this is what my developer recommended.

Can you confirm that this will work (I hope so) for the various recurring events?

Regards,
Tak

[center4aging]

Andras,

Thank you … hope you are feeling better!

I will wait for the UID feature to hopefully make it to future releases; in the meantime I will refrain from updating & just wipeout the database before importing the CSV.

Curious, is the UID not used anywhere or only in the “import” feature?

Since you asked … this is somewhat related to the “import” feature; what I started asking was also a missing feature (i.e. recurring events through CSV import). Ultimately using a third party plugin was suggested and I started looking into it. Still, couldn’t figure out much.

Frankly, I haven’t had time to educate myself of what I am supposed to be researching recurring events and that is my fault. But since you mentioned about possibility of new features if resources permits, is CSV import creating recurring events a possible development feature for future releases?

Happy holidays to you too!

Regards,
Tak

[center4aging]

Thanx Andra!

Can you verify it is actually: title AND (start date OR end date OR start time)?

Anyways the above feels a little to scary to use in production & I’m glad I found this out as we are still in staging. Still, isn’t there a better way to do this import or the whole idea of tracking the events data?

A little unhappy that marketing of CSV import functions including updating and the reality has such delta …

Tak

[center4aging]

Thanx Jamie.

The first thing for me is to define ALL allowable values to define a pattern. For example what values are needed in what fields to import so an event can be created:
– starting date of 12/18/2017
– end date of 06/30/2018
– repeats every second and third Fridays of the month
– exception dates of blah, blah, & blah.

Reformatting, you are saying, will get me those allowable possible values – cool.
Tak

[center4aging]

Hi Jamie,

Thanx for consulting with your colleagues.

Sorry that it’s getting time to understand this 🙁

You have hit the nail one the head: recurrence rules. In my own admittance I am NOT quite there with the newer languages so if I’m to take a hazard guess, you are saying that if I reformat what the WP All Import engineer uncovered for me, I can get all the possible recurrence rules enumerated?

Sorry if this is taking long and thanx for your patience!

[center4aging]

Above statement was from our developers. To put more context around this question here’s a particular scenario that we noticed our records being duplicated. FWIW, the work around for now, until we understand more from Modern Tribe, is to go in and delete events from WP-Admin *before* importing – i.e. circumventing the “update” process altogether.

1. We imported the original CSV with 60 rows of data
2. We deleted several rows of data in the middle
3. We reimported & saw they were duplicated.

Regards,
Tak

[center4aging]

Hi Jamie,

Regarding your latest links … unfortunately, I have “been there & done that”.

Maybe with this long thread I’ve confused you but at this juncture I need to know several things that WP All Import engineer has tried to show me: what really are the fields used by Events Calendar Pro and ALL the allowable values to those fields that make an event “recurring” according to the patterns specified, exception dates, etc.

FYI, here’s what the WP All Import engineer helped me understand and I think we have reached a point that I need info from Modern Tribe as to what I asked above in BOLD:

“In looking at this, some custom PHP code would have to be used with our API to get recurring events imported properly.

When a recurring event is created, a series of child events are created in the “tribe_events” post type, with the child events being associated with the parent event via the “post_parent” column in the “wp_posts” database table.

Also, for all events (both the parent & the child events), the serialized array you mentioned has to be created & stored in the _EventRecurrence custom field for an event. Here’s how the data looks when it’s been unserialized: http://www.unserialize.com/s/21039e8d-4055-e489-0296-0000468287e4″

Can you validate what he figured out about – i.e. is that how it works? Also is it possible for me to know the question above – i.e. fields, allowable values, etc?

[center4aging]

Hi Jamie,

I’ve reached out to WP All Import and talking with Michael. Per his instructions I created a demo site on their website and stepped through a process to see what WP All Import sees. The results are what you see in the attached PDFs.

I’m poking at things blindly but in one section during step 3, I was able to query (i.e. auto-detect) the custom fields used by Events Calendar Pro and one field –

Here’s a snippet of my findings Email to WP All Import’s Michael – I’ll put it in BOLD:

I poked around in All Imports & stepped through while exploring stuff … in step 3.1 I used the auto-detect to pull up custom fields & 19 were discovered(?). A little over my head at this point & dangerous (LOL!) but the custom field Event Recurrence had underlying information & the Key:Value table looked interesting with the Value of each Key probably meaning something to specify(?) the recurrence pattern … although I have no clue what “a:3” or “s:12″ may mean (unless they are reserved system variables of WP?). This is a snippet of what I saw …

Key: Value

rules: a:1:{i:0;a:6:{s:4:”type”;s:6:”Custom”;s:6:”custom”;a:4:{s:8:”interval”;s:1:”1″;s:4:”week”;a:1:{s:3:”day”;a:1:{i:0;s:1:”3″;}}s:9:”same-time”;s:3:”yes”;s:4:”type”;s:6:”Weekly”;}s:8:”end-type”;s:2:”On”;s:3:”end”;s:10:”2018-06-27″;s:14:”EventStartDate”;s:19:”2017-12-06 11:30:00″;s:12:”EventEndDate”;s:19:”2017-12-06 14:00:00″;}}

exclusions: a:3:{i:0;a:4:{s:4:”type”;s:6:”Custom”;s:6:”custom”;a:4:{s:4:”date”;a:1:{s:4:”date”;s:10:”2017-12-20″;}s:9:”same-time”;s:3:”yes”;s:4:”type”;s:4:”Date”;s:8:”interval”;i:1;}s:14:”EventStartDate”;s:19:”2017-12-06 11:30:00″;s:12:”EventEndDate”;s:19:”2017-12-06 14:00:00″;}i:1;a:4:{s:4:”type”;s:6:”Custom”;s:6:”custom”;a:4:{s:4:”date”;a:1:{s:4:”date”;s:10:”2018-01-03″;}s:9:”same-time”;s:3:”yes”;s:4:”type”;s:4:”Date”;s:8:”interval”;i:1;}s:14:”EventStartDate”;s:19:”2017-12-06 11:30:00″;s:12:”EventEndDate”;s:19:”2017-12-06 14:00:00″;}i:2;a:6:{s:4:”type”;s:6:”Custom”;s:6:”custom”;a:4:{s:8:”interval”;s:1:”1″;s:5:”month”;a:3:{s:8:”same-day”;s:2:”no”;s:6:”number”;s:6:”Fourth”;s:3:”day”;s:1:”3″;}s:9:”same-time”;s:3:”yes”;s:4:”type”;s:7:”Monthly”;}s:8:”end-type”;s:2:”On”;s:3:”end”;s:10:”2018-06-27″;s:14:”EventStartDate”;s:19:”2017-12-06 11:30:00″;s:12:”EventEndDate”;s:19:”2017-12-06 14:00:00″;}}

By any chance is this “the” field that instructs how recurring events are to be created? Is the REST API doc where I find the acceptable values and what they are? Or are there other fields that Events Calendar Pro works with?

Again, I may be totally off as, admittedly, I don’t have the expertise. Michael from WP All Import has gotten me this far, any chance Modern Tribe can help me too so I can assess if WP All Import is the tool I can use to augment Events calendar Pro? I understand policy and I’m not trying to do something illegal – just trying to assess if I can invest in WP All talk and if I can what the process is to configure to import recurring events.

Tak

[center4aging]

Thanx Jamie.

Can I be lazy and ask you this: are the fields to import into to set an event as recurring exposed through that API?

Frankly, I’m old school as in I developed circa 1991 to 1999 in C & VB3 so I am a dinasour in the development. I learn something each day so I will look into the REST API doc you linked above but to really talk intelligently to the WP All Import folks, I don’t think that’ll happen anytime soon. Also we have budget (grant) restrictions, although it’ll be Iwe can’t onboard another developer. I know if we had the budget I would’ve already asked our developer to look in but this is out-of-scope so I have to do the ground work.

So, again, if I can cut corners do you know if those fields necessary to setup recurring events as imports exposed & available through REST API?

Thanx for the continued communication!

Tak

[center4aging]

Hi Jamie,

So from LaToya I understand that Modern Tribe can’t reach out to WP All Talk. Unfortunate but it’s okay & I will try to talk from both sides of my mouth.

So I’m not quite sure what the lingo is in the WordPress world but in the old developer days I used the word “API” when trying to “talk” to functions – whether internal or external to ower container.

So assuming that is similar idea of exposing one’s fields/functions/etc. in the WordPress world, is other plugins like WP All Talk able to see the fields that make the Modern Tribe’s plugin work – i.e. more specifically should the WP All Talk be able to “see” these import destinations specific to setting up recurring events? The fields that are populated when one goes manually through wp-admin portal that is …

If I know that one “should” then I can take that info to WP All Talk and se if they’ll play ball and help me. Your quick reponse will be appreciated …

Tak

[center4aging]

Hi Jaime,

Our developer says that many fields could be mapped *but* for the specifications of recurring event fields, the third party couldn’t map to those fields – i.e. the recurring pattern specifying fields, exceptions dates, etc.

I know this is very “out there’ but is it even possible that Modern Tribe engineer & Wp ALL Import engineer have a quick talk as they say they can work with most plugins? It may be a quick switch our developers need to flip so WP All Import plugin sees all Modern Tribe plugin fields & map perfectly? I know I may be using language that doesn’t make sense.

If we can figure that out then we can purchase the pro version of the WP All Import and will alleviate a lot of headache of having to manually go in & update the imported events into recurring events …

Thanx.
Tak

[center4aging]

Thanx Jamie.

So this other plugin you recommend … are you saying that we can tell the CSV file something like this?

The first line is the fields in your event plugin;
The second line is the data for one time events;
The third line is the data for recurring events.

Venue, Event, Start Date, End Date, Recurs, Exception Date(s)
Senior Center A, 12/25/17, 12/25,17,,,
Senior Center A, 11,27/17, 01/01/18, Mondays, 01/01/18

Also what import do I use – Modern Tribes or this third party that you recommend?

A little confused but basically there is a lot to crate in the recurring events data. We like the robustness of your UI, but weighing options of “what/who?” creates these recurring events. As a nonprofit, funds are limited 🙁

Mely

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