[Craig Grant]

Cliff,
1)

The only mention of the default-template.php file in the Themer’s Guide was for ‘the-events-calendar’: http://cl.ly/1G2m1Q1Z3b01

Is there a different set of documentation for Pro than there is for the regular version because the only one I have only seen 1. If there is a different/separate guide please provide a link to it, otherwise provide me a path to find the default-template.php file because as i have stated even in the /pro folder structure I am not finding it.

2)

If you want me to look into it further, please follow our Testing for Conflicts Guide and see if that helps narrow down the cause of this. If it doesn’t, please leave your site in this state so we can take a look.
My previous question was what are my next steps/options here. If I need to follow up with the theme provider to please give me details what they would need to address. If it is on Tribe, can you please provide a link to the Testing for Conflicts Guide because again I am not seeing where this is.

3)

Maybe Testing for Conflicts will assist here too.

[Craig Grant]

Cliff,
My responses to your reply:
1)

default-template.php is right where it says it should be, but, from your screenshot, it seems you’re in the ‘events-calendar-pro’ directory and not ‘the-events-calendar’.

I don’t think you looked at my screenshot as I showed you the file path was to the events-calendar-pro (not the-events-calendar) and that there was nothing in that folder called default-template.php. Unless it is called something totally different than that, there is nothing in that folder with that file name. So please provide me more detail if you feel it is there.

2)

I can only provide such help if your site is running a WordPress default theme like TwentyFourteen, TwentyFifteen, TwentySixteen, etc. because I cannot tell what your theme is doing to the widget/shortcode vs what (if any) error/odd/custom output is from the widget/shortcode itself.

So is this your way of saying this is a conflict with the theme? And if it is what is my next step or options as you aren’t giving any advice here. Is this something I can fix with css, is it something I would need to contact the theme developer (and if so what do I have them look into), etc. A little guidance would be appreciated.

3)

To make a text link a “big button”, you’d need to follow the Themer’s Guide and override Line 67 of this file: https://github.com/moderntribe/the-events-calendar/blob/develop/src/views/widgets/list-widget.php#L10-L12

I also cannot assist with all of your styling/color customizations. If there’s just one you really need, please let me know and I may be able to make that exception.

If you need some coding help, you may want to ask your developer or reference our list of known customizers.

I am not asking you to assist me in styling, but when it is not taking on any of the defaults of the theme or of the widget and just producing weird random results as it is, just like with item 2 I feel you should provide me a bit of guidance how to fix it. So please provide a bit of help here so that I can figure out how to address it because if the plugin or short code was working properly I wouldn’t need to do any styling as what I desire is the default look.

[Craig Grant]

Hi Cliff,
Sure not a problem.
For the calendar list display, I have provided a marked up screenshot of http://www.reti.us/hpv2/ which shows both outputs side by side. In the left column is the shortcode [tribe_events_list limit=”3″] and you will see it is the horizontal row display that I desire but lacks the day/date icon to the left of the calendar events items. In the right column is the Event List widget which is producing 2 columns of event items each in a separate box display. What I desire is the short code display but with the day/date icons to the left of them as shown in the default display you provided in the demos of widget link (and I have confirmed the day/date icon is properly showing on my other sites that have the Event Calendar Pro widget on them, so this issue is limited to the RETI.us site). Also the font color of the links doesn’t match the defaults of the site css and the View More is a pretty big button that I would like to make a smaller link. I’ve also included a screenshot of it looking proper/the way I want it on one of my other sites omcar.com

As for the default file missing item. In the Themer’s Guide instructions it states the following:
You can also modify the selected template’s markup to adjust things as well. To do that first find out what template you are using in Events –> Settings –> Display. If you have selected the Default Events Template, the plugin will use the /wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar/src/views/default-template.php template file for the display. You can override and edit this by making a copy and placing in an ‘tribe-events’ folder in your theme.

I confirmed that I am using the Default Events Template but when I go through the folder structure of the plugin (and I’ve looked everywhere possible) I do not find a default-template.php file. And as I’ve indicated, I have followed the instructions and set up the new folder structure in my theme to try and make some changes to the plugin display and nothing seems to be working/updating the site. So not sure if this is a sign that the plugin didn’t fully install properly or of something else, but I do not find that file anywhere. I have provided a marked up screen shot showing the default-template.php file is not in the folders and the folder structure of public_html/reti/wp-content/plugins/events-calendar-pro/src/views/pro

Let me know if you have any questions, need anything else or what the next steps would be. Thanks.

[Craig Grant]

Geoff,
First I want to thank you for doing this including adding reti.us license to the account. And yes I would be happy to provide you a backup of rairc.com db. Can you please provide instructions how to do this and I will be happy to do so.

[Craig Grant]

Geoff,
Thank you again for your response and I agree we are definitely on the same wavelength and moving in the right direction together now.

As for your response on the RETI.us item, I completely understand the policy of not supporting free accounts and that you are stating the issue was acknowledged by your team but I think you have to understand that from my side at the time, going on George’s response (as he was the only person I have had contact with) I felt the issue was being totally ignored. Despite the fact I told him it was replicating at an alarming rate, he did not say we are looking into it, give me anything I could try on my end or recommend and give me options to add a license to that domain. He basically gave zero input on it. I assumed that he provided me that extra license to add to that domain to get it addressed and once I submitted the ticket for it, he immediately removed the license from my account, chastised me and closed the ticket without offering any help or options. So that problem was totally compounded by the way George handled (or lack there of) it.

With the original issues reported becoming more issues once I updated the plugin, I again feel that problem was also totally compounded by George as he never once recommended that I create new/separate tickets and as I have detailed he kept asking the same questions over and over and wasn’t incorporating the details I provided him (which included marked up screenshots & even cached versions of sites) which just kept wasting day after day of the issues not being resolved affecting my clients live sites.

And that doesn’t even factor in the way he was very unprofessional and even challenged me at times (his response on 6/29 which has been removed from this thread where he states “Does this anger you? Does this make you want to write how you are upset with support. That is fine”).

So, bottomline is I am very happy to hear there are other members on your team as in my opinion he just made a bad situation much worse with the way he handled things. If he was a member of my support team he would be fired because I was on the verge of cancelling and provided the plugin a pretty negative rating/review before you got involved.

As for the steps you provided to try and fix the rair.com license. I have already tried those several times with no success. And an important detail is that as we have discussed, the rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com is an alias of rairc.com so there is no possibility to log into rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com/wp-admin and then separately log into rairc.com/wp-admin as they are the same place seeing as the rairc.staging.yournewsites.com/wp=admin redirects to rairc.com/wp-admin. So please let me know if there is any other option to fix this.

Thank you again.

[Craig Grant]

Geoff,
Thank you for getting involved and I appreciate you doing so as yes I am definitely at the point where I am pretty frustrated with this experience especially dealing with George. While I totally understand the fact that the 4th site RETI.us did not have a paid license, that issue just started the other day and while George did make a good gesture by granting me a free license, it was not clear at all that it was supposed to be used for the omcar.com site as he specified in his last response (especially when it was not the only domain with an issue at that time).

As for the overall issue, from the beginning of the ticket licenses of 2 of the 3 domains were were screwed up, omcar.com and rairc.com. The plugin for Omcar.com wouldn’t update due to the license issue and rairc.com was showing as rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com.

Once we got the plugins to update with the instructions George provided, a whole new set of issues arose as all the calendar events on the site started producing 404s because the permalinks got screwed up (it took George several days to address that). Then the display I had prior to the update (mini calendar with limit=”0″ in one column and event list=”3″ in a column to the right of it) wouldn’t work with the same short code I had before the update. So what started as 2 issues turned into multiple and George was pretty useless in helping me solve them as this has dragged on for 3-weeks.

It took George over 20 responses to understand that the staging.yournewsites.com urls were aliases redirecting to the domains (even though I stated it multiple times) and even to date he still gave me zero insight into how to fix it. I was able to figure it out for omcar.com but that problem still persists for rairc.com showing rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com in your system. Basically he kept replying asking the same questions over and over and not incorporating anything I had provided him into account, which just kept wasting more and more time while the issues were still affecting my live sites.

As someone who runs a software development company I can understand the protocol of not providing support to free accounts, but I can’t believe the issue was ignored when I provided proof that the plugin was replicating events from 200 to 60,000 in a matter of a couple of days and was literally crashing a dedicated vps all by itself. Especially when I am already a paying customer and indicated if my experiences were better I would have already upgraded to add a license to reti.us (which George never offered to me). It appears I have fixed that issue myself (again not even a hint of help from George).

So the only remaining problem is the rairc.com license pointing to rairc2.staging.yournewsites.com. If you can give me some insights how to fix that and also assure me that George is not the only one on the support team I will try to give this a clean slate going forward.

One separate thing is I have been trying to mess with the Event Pro widgets and find them very limiting, is there anything that can be done to enhance them (ex. ability to hide dates with no events in the list or have calendar display with list, not just when someone clicks on a calendar date, etc.)?

Thank you. Craig

[Craig Grant]

George,
Seeing as you closed the ticket regarding reti.us, the only way for me to respond to you is in this ticket. It is one thing to not fix any of my issues, but now you have become completely unprofessional. I just reviewed the reply from 6/24 where you added the Personal License and nowhere in it did you specify it was just for OMCAR.com and I assumed you added it to my account to address my overall frustration. And for you to remove that license completely from my account just now because OMCAR.com is now fixed (by my doing, nothing you helped with), is ridiculous as it is still an issue with RAIRC.com.

Plus I have indicated I am willing to add more licenses but am hesitant to do so based on how buggy the plugin has been on all 4 sites I have installed it on and on top of that dealing with you. So if you are the only person I can deal with, please let me know and I will look into another solution going forward and will most definitely leave a negative review of the plugin as you continue to make a bad situation even worse with your lack of assistance and lack of professionalism.

[Craig Grant]

I was able to fix the domain issue on OMCAR.com by editing one record in the WP_Options table that contained the omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com url, but tried the same process for rairc.com by making sure there were zero instances of staging.yournewsites.com in any of the data tables in WP including WP_Options and then updating the plugin license (disconnecting the domain in my tribe account, then remove and then readd the license in the Events Calendar Pro plugin settings and refreshing the license key page in my tribe account) and the rairc.com site still shows staging2.yournewsites.com in my Tribe Account. Note the reason I have indicated I am frustrated with the support is 30+ replies on this ticket and at no point was I given any hint to check the WP_Options table. But again, this fixed one domain (omcar.com) and not the other (rairc.com) so the issue still persists.

I also added a license to the RETI.us domain, so I am going to create a second ticket for that one regarding the events replicating and causing major server issues with the info provided in my post yesterday. But the bottomline is I am a very unhappy customer because the plugin has been very buggy on multiple installs and the support as detailed has been unhelpful to say the least.

[Craig Grant]

George or whomever is taking over this ticket,
I look forward to hearing from them, as I have indicated over 30 back and forth replies between us and no resolution after 3+ weeks is not a good result, so hopefully they can help fix my issues.

And, I just heard back from GoDaddy’s Fully Managed Server Support Team that the results of the Slow Query Test they ran determined the Event Calendar Pro plugin is 100% the cause of the issues my VPS is having that is affecting all of my sites on that server to run slowly as the plugin is replicating events at a high rate, running a server query non-stop and causing all the server resources to spike beyond capacity (even though the server is at only 25% server space usage). So I really need help to resolve these issues asap as this is affecting the performance of all of my sites including ones that don’t even have the Event Calendar Pro Plugin. Here’s the script they provided which is the cause of the problems.

SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS DISTINCT wp_posts.*, MIN(wp_postmeta.meta_value) as EventStartDate, MIN(tribe_event_end_date.meta_value) as EventEndDate FROM wp_posts INNER JOIN wp_postmeta ON ( wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id ) LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta as tribe_event_end_date ON ( wp_posts.ID = tribe_event_end_date.post_id AND tribe_event_end_date.meta_key = ‘_EventEndDate’ ) WHERE 1=1 AND ( wp_posts.post_parent = 12910 OR wp_posts.ID = 12910 ) AND (
wp_postmeta.meta_key = ‘_EventStartDate’
) AND wp_posts.post_type = ‘tribe_events’ AND ((wp_posts.post_status = ‘publish’)) AND (wp_postmeta.meta_value >= ‘2016-06-27 14:35:05’ OR (wp_postmeta.meta_value <= ‘2016-06-27 14:35:05’ AND tribe_event_end_date.meta_value >= ‘2016-06-27 14:35:05’ )) GROUP BY wp_posts.ID ORDER BY EventStartDate ASC, wp_posts.post_date ASC LIMIT 27120, 10;

[Craig Grant]

George,
As I have mentioned, as a paying customer your responses are getting pretty frustrating. We are now on the 29th back and forth on the same ticket because you seem to answer a thing at a time without really addressing the issues being reported and don’t take details previously provided to you in prior responses into account. For example I feel I explained pretty well multiple times on this ticket that omcar.com and omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com were redirects or aliases of each other and asked you several times how to fix it so that the proper domain omcar.com is what is shown in the licenses in my Tribe account. And only in your last response did you finally get this important detail.

Also frustrating is when you respond with semantics. When I say I have 3 licenses and you respond back you have 1 license (but you and I both know what I meant as 1 Agency license covers 3 sites) and then don’t address the issue it just wastes more time on both sides.

The issue I indicated on RETI.us while it is not one of the 3 sites in my Agency account, it is getting way worse, yesterday it was at 33,000 events, today it is at 58,000 and completely effecting the performance of that site as it has been crashing all day and GoDaddy support is running a Slow Query Report which will most likely indicate this plugin is the culprit. So while it is not one of the 3 sites in my account I am asking that you tell me how to fix that asap.

As I have stated, I would be open to using your plugin on more sites, but the reason I haven’t done it yet is because it has been extremely buggy from day 1 on all 4 sites I have installed it on (All of the issues in this current ticket were fine until I did the most recent upgrade of the Event Calendar Pro Plugin and here we are 29 responses and 3-weeks later on the same ticket.) Add to that the frustration with the support I have detailed here is why I stated I might just want a refund and find another solution.

It is not my goal to leave and find a different solution, I would prefer to make this plugin work, but all I ask is that you address the issues being reported and not have a ticket take 30 responses and cover 3-weeks going forward. Thank you.

[Craig Grant]

George,
Again I don’t think you really read my responses as we keep rehashing the same things over and over. omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com is an alias that redirects to omcar.com. Same thing with omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com/wp-admin, it redirects to omcar.com/wp-admin. So there is no separate login for omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com/wp-admin (so all the domain settings are the same).

Once you login to omcar.com/wp-admin I have shown you multiple times that everything is configured to omcar.com and not omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com. So I have no idea where or how your plugin is pulling the omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com url from for the license and 20+ responses between you and I back and forth and you still haven’t answered that question. Where is it getting the info from and how do I on my end or you on your end fix it. Do I need to edit the htaccess file, is it in the functions.php file, etc.

And for you to say you are not going to answer my quesiton about the new issue on RETI.us because it doesn’t have a license is a joke. I have 3 paid licenses with you. I would be willing to buy more if I had any confidence in the plugin but all 4 sites I have it installed on have had multiple issues since I installed them. So if you don’t address how the events on that site all of a sudden when from 250 to 47000+ events I will look into another option and if I do I will request a full refund of the purchase of this plugin as it has not been a positive experience which will be reflected in my review of it.

[Craig Grant]

George,
This is weird, this is the 2nd time that I have updated the ticket and my update is not in the thread. So let me respond to it again.
1. Yes omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com does exist but it was a staging url while the site was being built and the site has been live and using the primary domain for several months at omcar.com. So if you go to omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com (or /wp-admin) it just redirects to the omcar.com which is what is configured in the settings in WP.
2. Yes they have the same ip because as stated in #1 it is an alias and redirects to omcar.com
3. Yes there is a licence, but when it tries to update it states it can’t as I have provided proof of a couple of times.
4. I have done that multiple times and it just adds it back into my Tribe account as omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com which is why I have asked you for help on this.

Now there is a new issue on a different site RETI.us. Recently it had about 250 or 13 pages of events (some of which are duplicated because they are weekly reoccurring events). I just checked it and it now has 47355 or 2368 pages of events. It looks like the same events are being duplicated 20+ times. Is there anything we can do to clean up and fix this?

I am starting to have serious concerns about the stability of your plugin as it has had multiple issues on all of the sites I have installed it on.

[Craig Grant]

attachments mentioned in prior post

[Craig Grant]

George,
The css fixed the issue on the home page so thank you for that. My only question is why was this necessary now and not in the past, because as I showed you it was working without that code prior to the recent plugin update.

As for the license issue, attached are screenshots of me removing the site omcar.com from the license list (Disconnect Now button) in my Tribe account and then after it is added back in from the license tab of the plugin in WP. And you will see it is auto adding it as omcar1.staging.yournewsites.com instead of omcar.com. So is there a way for you to change this on your end or something I can do to ensure it won’t continue to have issues updating properly.

Thanks.

[Craig Grant]

George,
Just thought of another way to prove that the issue with the event list showing up under the calendar image was working with limit=”0″ before the plugin update was done. Here’s a screenshot from InternetArchive.org of the home page from 6-1-16 https://web.archive.org/web/20160315113935/http://www.omcar.com/ and you will see the calendar has no events under it.

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