[Citizen LocalMotive]

Thanks. I added a request for a new feature with a couple of possible solutions. Facebook events have unique Event Id’s event if they are shared in many places. The Event ID can be used to prevent the same event from being imported repeatedly: https://www.displaysocialmedia.com/get-find-facebook-event-id/

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Please have it import the venue name. If the venue name is obvious to all residents like the “State Capitol” or the “Community Center” or “Capitol Theater”, no address is required for these. But the name is! These types of venues people will tend not to enter addresses because everyone knows where they are. Can you gather all the info that is entered?

Also, there are some events at private residences where the addresses will be provided on registration. The organizers wants their venue of Private Residence: Address to Be Provided to get through to the calendar.

Thank you.

Carolyn

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Hi Jennifer,
Sorry, the event is in the past and their Facebook page is not letting me access it anymore. When it happens again I will send you details more promptly. What they did was post a series of events as one events post in Facebook. The calendar read in the start time and date of the first event and the ending time and date of the last event and made it one one event.

Thanks.
Carolyn

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Our status on this issue, to have events copy fully intact to other calendars:

• Venue name now appears in both .ical and +Google. Thanks for the great help!

• Organizer comes across in .ical, but the Google calendar UI seems to lack support for an organizer field. It’s odd, because the event import API does include an organizer field. When I add an organizer as a parameter, it is not visible. Our workaround will be to pre-pend the organizer to the description…unless you have better ideas!

• When events are imported to the Google calendar via either method, the user is presented with a calendar destination, which appears to be the default or “root” calendar. So I don’t think that is an outstanding issue.

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Yay! It works! The +Google button now carries the export name. Here’s what we did:

function gcal_venue_name_in_location ( array $parameters ) {
$venue_name = strip_tags(tribe_get_venue());
$parameters['location'] = $venue_name . '@' . $parameters['location'];
return $parameters;
}
add_filter( 'tribe_google_calendar_parameters', 'gcal_venue_name_in_location' );

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Citizen LocalMotive.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Citizen LocalMotive.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Citizen LocalMotive.

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Wow, thanks! That was an extremely helpful reply! I was not aware of this WordPress-ism, and had earlier assumed filters were specific to The Events Calendar.

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Thanks! I will try something similar with tribe_google_calendar_parameters.

Incidentally, could you help me understand what the hard-coded 10,2 parameters refer to? I copied these from other add_filter examples, but could not find the reference documentation for the add_filter function.

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Thanks very much for the response, Cliff. After perusing the source code you mentioned, here is what I did to prepend the venue name to the location. Could you review this to let me know if this is the most appropriate way to accomplish this? It works, but I wonder if it will cause a problem to create an entire new instance of Tribe_Events_Main.

add_filter( 'tribe_ical_feed_item', 'tribe_ical_add_venue_name', 10, 2 );
function tribe_ical_add_venue_name ( $item, $eventPost ) {
$venue_name = strip_tags(tribe_get_venue());
$tec = Tribe__Events__Main::instance();
$location = $tec->fullAddressString( $event_post->ID );
$str_location = str_replace( array( ',', "\n" ), array( '\,', '\n' ), html_entity_decode( $location, ENT_QUOTES ) );
$item[] = 'LOCATION:' . $venue_name . '\' . $str_location;
return $item;
}

With this enabled, the venue name shows up in front of the address when I manually import the .ical into the Google calendar. The map link from the Google calendar seems to also work ok. The venue name does look a little funny with the ‘\’ visible after the venue name.

Also, is there any hook for applying this same logic to the +Google button?

Thanks again, and Happy New Year!!!

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Citizen LocalMotive.

[Citizen LocalMotive]

I just went through creating a WP-staging site, activated the twenty-sixteen template, disabled all plug ins that were not associated with the event calendar and cleared my browser cache. Plus I ran the associated import feed in the Event Aggregator. I also made sure the venue appears in the venue library. I then returned to an example event where the venue is not importing — and the venue still does not import.

Example:
Original event: https://www.facebook.com/events/161440937950575
Imported event without venue: http://localmotive.org/event/not-another-mistake-on-the-lake-pack-the-public-hearing/

Thanks for your help.

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Testing for conflicts seems involved and risky.

Here is another example of a venue that did not get imported with the feed. There are many:
The original event is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/161440937950575
How it is imported is here, sans any information about venue:
http://localmotive.org/event/not-another-mistake-on-the-lake-pack-the-public-hearing/

Does this occur when they event organizer uses a named venue that doesn’t appear in our venue library?

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Thank you for your great help!

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Hi Courtney, Maybe I wasn’t clear… you already have a field for an Event Category. I am primarily suggesting changing it to something more generally useful, like a tag. That doesn’t seem like anymore customization required than the Event Category did. I can’t imagine many people find being able to specify Event Category very useful for reasons above.

(I should have left off the second part of my suggestion, as it seems to have caused a distraction from the main suggestion. Sorry.)

Thanks in advance.

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Hi there,

I hope this is not too bothersome a question to pop up over the holidays! I saw your post and understand if the response time is slower than usual. However, we are hoping for an answer soon, as we are getting antsy about these problems on the site. Carolyn, who posted the earlier questions, asked me to get involved. I’m a volunteer developer, with some PHP experience from long ago, but can hopefully figure it out.

Your previous answers have been helpful, and the code examples that I found for tribe_ical_feed_item filter look promising. I’m glad the ical export is so customizable! I hope we can custom the output of the .ical export to include the missing data elements of venue name for the Location field, and also populate the missing Organizer field (we’re not seeing it in the .ical text file).

The number of different examples I can find just by Googling tribe_ical_feed_item are a bit overwhelming. Would you be able to help with a code snippet showing how to just override the behavior of that specific Location field? Or, help me find the best docs on how to use this? I have had a bit of trouble finding the docs on that add_filter function which I see in the examples. My docs search didn’t find it.

We also would like to have the Venue Name included. My reading of the spec suggests it belongs in the Location. I have seen it mentioned that some calendars don’t handle it well, so maybe you remove the venue for compatibility. Our users mostly rely upon Google Calendar, so I hope it works for that. We would appreciate any heads up on knowing which calendars might break upon receiving the Venue name within the Location field.

Thanks again! — Sheila

[Citizen LocalMotive]

Hi Cliff,
I am pretty sure (I apologize if I am wrong) you missed the second part of my question. First please allow me to reexplain. In last paragraph I will make a follow up request. Both parts of my original questions are OUTPUT questions, not input questions and pertain to how others use our Events Calendar and the features we offer them. Our users (other organizations) are trying to use the two buttons on the top of an event on our calendar to transfer an event from our calendar to their calendar and ultimately *to their website*. The “+iCal Button” saves to a duplicate calendar on whatever calendar they last used (be it outlook, google, whatever), but does not save to their root calendar. The fact that the ultimate goal is to transfer the event to their website is crucial. The groups use calendars such as Google or Timely and then html code to embed their **root** calendar into their website. Therefore, the duplicate calendars that the +iCal button creates do not get included in the html embed code unless their html code of their website is modifed (something we don’t want to make them do just to add an event to their calendar). Please try it.

Regarding the +Google button, this does in fact save to their root calendar and so, yes, does get posted to their calendar. However, the data is not left complete. For example, if a venue is named “Capitol Theater” in the Event Calendar the name does not get through to the Google calendar, only the address. Most people will want to know the name of the place they are looking for. That is just one example of the event details that do not survive a Google save intact. Our users have already complained about the quality of the data.

Follow up Request: I think the iCal data may retain more data intact than the Google save, so I am focusing on it.
I think the answer is you currently do not have a feature that meets our needs. But given that, do you have any references on how we might attack the problem writing our own customizations or scripts that would save iCal data to a user’s ROOT calendar or allow the user to specify a destination in the save process? Or might you be interested in making such an upgrade? I think to allow the user to specify a destination for saving the iCal data might not be a difficult upgrade and would be very useful.

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

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