[cityparksfoundation]

Welp, I sure love starting the day feeling like an idiot. Yes, that’s exactly what happened. I set up the categories not knowing at the time that SS Kids was a totally separate entity (who knew?!). Thanks so much for serving as Captian Obvious for me.

I hope you have a great long weekend – after dealing with stupid questions like mine, you deserve it! 🙂

Thanks!
Stephanie

[cityparksfoundation]

Hi, Geoff –

I tried Search Everything and another plugin called Relevanssi, which sounded very promising. Unfortunately they didn’t affect the Tribe search at all. They do seem to have an effect on the main site search, but not Tribe events search.

If you do a search in the main site search for Brooklyn, the Felice Brothers event shows up on page 12. It still doesn’t show up at all in the Tribe search. How do I get this plugin to tie in with Tribe search?

Thanks!
Stephanie

[cityparksfoundation]

Hi, Geoff –

I wanted to get the pagination thing fixed before I replied, to see what our actual results are on Page 2 and beyond. Now that it’s fixed, I’m getting the same results on page 1 and on page 2 we get a few more results, but there are still many events that are categorized in Brooklyn that don’t show up in the “brooklyn” search at all.

Again if you search here:

https://www.cityparksfoundation.org/events/

for brooklyn in the Tribe search, go to page 2 and you’ll never see the June 4 event (The Felice Brothers / The Barr Brothers), which is categorized in Brooklyn.

Are categories not included in the search parameters in the out-of-the-box search? If not, how can we include them? The client has been categorizing very specifically with search in mind, so we really need this to function as they expect.

Thanks!
Stephanie

[cityparksfoundation]

Hi, again –

I wanted to circle back to the original issue: A search for Brooklyn comes up with events in Bronx, Queens and Manhattan before all Brooklyn events are listed. If you search Brooklyn here:

https://www.cityparksfoundation.org/events

Compare that to the Brooklyn category:

https://www.cityparksfoundation.org/events/category/brooklyn/

For example, there is an event in Brooklyn, June 4, Felice Brothers, that doesn’t show up in the top 20 in the brooklyn search, but there are events in Queens, Bronx and Manhattan listed.

How can we get all Brooklyn events listed first?

Thanks!
Stephanie

[cityparksfoundation]

Hi, Geoff –

No, that’s not an option. This customization was built before I got on board with the project, and it is a doozy (that’s putting it mildly). Is there a way to get the search term to stick when the page refreshes? It seems like something that would be useful. Also, is there a way to get more relevant results on the first page? I know I’ve asked all of this before in so many words but I’m not really getting a straight answer.

Thanks!
Stephanie

[cityparksfoundation]

Hi, Geoff –

I think that will help somewhat but what we’d really like to do is get to the meat of the matter and optimize our events for more relevant results. I realized today that anything after Page 1 loses the search term. The reason for this is that we had to use WP’s default pagination since the Tribe pagination wasn’t working due to a theme conflict. This fashion of pagination refreshes the page, rather than just refreshing the list, which eliminates the search term for any page after Page 1.

Is there a way to get the search term to stick when refreshing the page? Additionally, do you have any advice on how to optimize our events?

Thanks!
Stephanie

[cityparksfoundation]

Hi, Geoff – How very odd. It’s working for me now, too. Alrightey, we can scratch that off and chalk it up to the tech mystery void.

I am still wondering, however, how we can optimize our events to show up in a less random fashion. We’re using categories and keywords up the wazoo (very technical term) to try and get them ordered more succinctly, but the multiple month headers I mentioned in my last correspondence are pretty misleading. Any advice you can offer? We already tried the Filter Bar, but due to a conflict with our rather unwieldy theme (and many hours spent trying to debug) we weren’t able to use it.

Thanks!
Stephanie

[cityparksfoundation]

Hi, Geoff – Thanks so much for your reply.

I am seeing those results on Page 2, however it’s a bit misleading as there is a June header on Page 1, then a May header at the top of Page 2 and then another June header further down Page 2 with the events in question listed under the second June header.

Another issue is that single terms that are in event titles and copy are not returning any results. For instance if you search here for “Felice”:

https://www.cityparksfoundation.org/events

There are no results even though we have an event here:

https://www.cityparksfoundation.org/event/summerstage-the-felice-brothers-the-barr-brothers/

With “felice” in the title, copy and URL. Oddly enough, if I search for “felice” within the Brooklyn category here:

https://www.cityparksfoundation.org/events/category/brooklyn

I get the correct result. What can we do to get better search results from this end? I guess my question is how does The Events Calendar search algorithm determine ranking, and how can we create events to improve/manipulate search results to better serve our users?

Thanks!
Stephanie

[cityparksfoundation]

Hi, Barry – Well, the DB was wiped clean successfully, but even with the snippet in functions.php the import still created corrupted data for recurring events. We ended up just recreating all the events on the live site.

I wish I’d known the issue with importing recurring events from the get-go so I could have saved a lot of headaches with this launch. My clients are not impressed with me or this plugin, which I recommended with confidence at the beginning of this project. I’ve recommended it to multiple other clients in the past, but I am reluctant to do so in future. I hope the recurring bug is fixed eventually.

Thanks!
Stephanie

[cityparksfoundation]

I’ll have our SQL guy try this out and let you know if this can be resolved. Thanks!

[cityparksfoundation]

To clarify, by events listing page, I meant the one in WP admin, not on the site.

[cityparksfoundation]

Thanks so much for the reply. I realize you guys are busy and the world doesn’t center around me, but apparently it does around my anxious client. 🙂

We’re actually having an issue with the events listing page. It’s timing out before we can get to the list so we can’t delete the events we currently have. I think this is due to the 4000+ events that the plugin thinks there are due to the corrupted data (in actuality there were only about 20 events to import, but many were recurring daily over a long period of time). So deleting events isn’t possible at this point.

Can I add the snippet to functions and try an import, or do we need to delete the events first? Problem is, deleting 4000 events is a bit daunting as well even if we could get to the listing page. This is why I think we need to wipe the DB of events and start fresh, now with the snippet.

Thanks!
Stephanie

[cityparksfoundation]

This reply is private.

[cityparksfoundation]

This reply is private.

[cityparksfoundation]

Shoot – I just realized I pasted the wrong XML file into dropbox. Please stand by while I retrieve the correct one. I had to import to live piecemeal so I have several files.

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