[Robert]

Thanks, Barry, we’ll give that a try. We are using wp-cli, so the ‘eval’ command there might be just what we need in terms of fully intialising WordPress and all of the plugins before executing this code. I’ll let you know!

[Robert]

Hi Barry,

I can understand your reticence to comment on custom development. 🙂

Here’s the part that interests me most: when we do an import using the WPXML we generate, then manually open a recurring Event, all of the address fields are correctly filled out. Then, if we click “Update”, it correctly generates all of the event children for the recurrence pattern.

So, there is a way to get the plugin to do the “heavy lifting” of generating the recurrence children for us using the data we import from WPXML–but it’s a manual way. I’m wondering if we can run something after the import to do the automated equivalent programmatically of clicking “Update” on each event for which there is recurrence, thus saving us a ton of time.

Any thoughts on how that might be possible?

Because the manual approach is setting up all the parent/child relationships for us correctly. Which is a lot easier than trying to do this in the export script (and less prone to error, since we’d be guessing at the exact logic the plugin is using!)

Thanks in advance.

Best,
Robert

[Robert]

Hi Barry,

So I did some “vanilla” export/import operations on Venues and discovered that all the fields do indeed map across correctly. So, armed with this I revisited our export and found an issue with how we were nesting one of the meta key/value pairs. That resolved, we now have correct venue location fields filled in! Yay!

However, after the import, the _VenueGeoAddress, _VenueLat, and _VenueLng fields aren’t being set by the script. If I go in and manually click “update” on a Venue, it will generate this data and plot the venue location on the Map view. But, as with our other ticket on getting recurrence to populate after import, it would be really nice, in fact quite important, to find a way to do this kind of updating programmatically instead of manually. Doing our own lat/lng geocoding for the export from our proprietary event system will really slow the export down.

So, do you know how we can trigger the hooks that get activated on a manual web admin update of a Venue (in this case, and an Event in the case of our other post) to be able to activate all of those “magic” functions in the plugin that populate the data set correctly based on the user input?

Thanks for your help!

Best,
Robert

[Robert]

Hi Barry,

So I had a look at the _EventNextPendingRecurrence meta-data and the idea of creating all child posts ourselves. Seems like a ton of work! Especially if there is some way that we can trigger the equivalent of clicking “Update” in the web-based WordPress admin programatically, so that all of these recurrences get created by the plugin instead of our export script. Do you know how we might do that?

Best,
Robert

[Robert]

Hi Barry,

I’ll try creating a venue manually, exporting, and importing to another vanilla test instance of WP. I’ll also check the underlying SQL data. I was just wondering if there were known “gotchas” here about the WPXML export/import process (like, e.g., it’s incomplete).

I’ll try some things and keep you posted. Thanks for being willing to kick around ideas.

Best,
Robert

[Robert]

Hi Barry,
Thanks for your reply. We’ll try implementing the _EventNextPendingRecurrence meta-data as well and see if that lets Event Calendar PRO generate all the recurrences at time of import.

If that doesn’t work, is there any way to trigger an update to the post programmatically after import? (i.e. without having to manually go into each Event in the admin).

Best,
Robert

[Robert]

To be clear, we are using the _EventRecurrence meta-data in WPXML, and this is correctly populating the fields for the Event as viewed in the WP Admin. It is not until we manually click “Update” on the event in the admin, however, that the magic happens with recurrence. We need to automate that magic.

[Author]

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