[Damion]

I’m going to mark this resolved. You really couldn’t have been more clear, especially in going over things a second time to underline what you meant, and even taking the time to illustrate it!

I was concerned about the possibility of the consolidation effort fixing new events and the actual search mechanism itself, but then leaving the events which were marked for one way or the other (whichever was the name, abbreviation or full, that did not get selected to be the main/remaining one) just no longer being searchable and kind of being orphaned, but it doesn’t look like that will be the case.

I can’t tell you how nice it is having you all as a support team. We have taken a powerful plugin perhaps best suited to normal human scale of events and asking it to deal with a wonky import source material and a giant backlog, and then to play nice across multiple add-ons each with their own ongoing changes, to say nothing of core.

And there are precious few hiccups. Far fewer than their ought to be. And for those couple that exist, you guys have spent all kinds of time and energy to make it as smooth a transition as possible. And now on top of everything to thank us for our patience and to extend a generous gift our way tgat we might get further use out of this already powerhouse package…? I’m the one thanking you (I, Vincent, on behalf of our site)…

I guess I’ll just say, I know how hard it can be doing support. How bad you want to help, how little information you have available to you that you’re given sometimes to be able to help with no less expectation (or desperation) on the customer end…and of course the sheer costs you eat going out of your way to nail down and work out the problems.

You are all worth your weight several times over.

One of the nice things experience gives me as a developer that I can communicate to clients is the ability to vet and vouch for plugins. You need a slider? Here are the really good ones, the easy to use ones, the reliable ones…and so on.

It’s so easy to recommend you guys for events. You make it easy. And beyond that I smile when I go to another site and see you’re already there…where you belong!

Going to update things soon thanks you your help. Wish me luck!

[Damion]

Hi Trisha,

Apologies for the delayed response as I’ve been in the hospital for quite some time recently and recovery’s been a bit slower than anticipated since I got out.

I’m also a big fan of the interconnectit script; most of the time I manually move a site between domains, it’s my tool of choice. Also nice for adjusting protocols between HTTP and HTTPS when there are hiccups from someone having an SSL cert change.

For searching these values out up until now, I mostly have been using phpMyAdmin, just doing SELECT queries to see what’s come up. Weirdly, my results to date have basically been your screenshot, which is to say, if there’s a state mentioned in the Venue part of the database, it’s the full name. I could not find abbreviations and would not have thought to force full names into abbreviations, as it’s not how they come and I figured it was the wrong spot to be doing it, since (what appeared to be) one kind of value was nevertheless producing two different kinds of values on the front end. I didn’t want to complicate things.

Do you have any query advice as far as finding only those results which are -just- the state name? Probably exact match, right? I don’t want to overwrite actual written content or titles with abbreviations like in the top of that last screenshot. There are barely any races there and there are nearly 400 returned results, so anything to shave down the time seems like a lovely idea =)

When you say,

“Also, it is worth noting that if you are using the latest version of Events Community, the State fields are auto-populated so that going forward you shouldn’t see any more errors like this.”

I am not sure what you mean. Not because it’s not clear, but because I still have half a brain after the hospital stay =) You’re saying if I manually go through and change out the full names to abbreviations , the dropdown will be full of only those abbreviations? I am hopeful that it will return results for both full name and abbreviation rather than returning different results as happens now.

I did upgrade, though, for what it’s worth =)

Thanks to you both for being such a big assist in sorting this out! It’s not ideal input, and I can appreciate that, we’re just trying to make the most of it =)

[Damion]

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[Damion]

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[Damion]

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[Damion]

Initially, the built in import tool using CSV, by the site admin.

For the past few months, mostly (but in much smaller proportion) Community Events with newly registered screened/moderated users of a special membership type.

There are some clear human errors in that regard, like things that are not city names at all, but the reason for this is mostly straightforward as you visit the edit venue screen and it was typed just that way.

Like you intimated, though, we’re really more worried about things that look invented by the system on their own when there’s nothing yet found in the database or the edit screens to suggest a motivation for it to do so.

We’ve thought about workarounds like adding a text box that leads to another page that’s more of a directory style template based off of their input, since you could then intercept and interpret the query yourself, but without knowing where to start with calling AJAX to update the calendar throwing people off of the page isn’t nearly as engaging or intuitive.

Not to mention it feels silly to keep using a Filter Bar when your site is set up in such a way that you keep having to turn off more pieces of the Filter Bar (that’s a comment about not yet identifying the cause and fully anticipating the source data playing into it…your work, collectively, is too polished and well maintained for anyone to accuse it of being hacky…It also has to deal with a bunch of different sites and setups and wonky data and sometimes maybe it just isn’t time for it to work out with certain sites through no fault of its own 🙂

Really appreciate the help as always!

[Damion]

Just a quick heads up (it doesn’t look like I can edit the original message), the actual HTML only appears to have regular Orlando in it (with a comma separated list of attribute values for the option tag), but ORLANDO in caps still comes up and provides a lack of results.

[Damion]

The query is, of course, well-formed, but didn’t bring back any results. Not even by surprise. As I mentioned, everything looks fine post-import, as far as the back end—even at the database level. It’s that bizarre front end presentation that’s throwing things off.

I literally can’t tell where it’s getting the abbreviation from, and definitely can’t tell how it’s picking sides.

The closest I can find is _field_20 and _field_60 in wp_postmeta; is it possible the plug-in generates its own kind of custom fields for what amounts to temporary storage or “translations” (not like between languages, but in lieu of an index to bounce between situations like this, from a postal code to a name)?

To be clear, I don’t have any evidence those are being generated by the plug-in, it’s just that, there’s nothing else installed that really has a need to mention state codes and there doesn’t appear to be anything else installed using the underscore up front as a convention for naming keys.

[Damion]

That is a neat trick! I’ve never seen that setting before.

It didn’t help with reproducing the whole list, at least not in any noticeable way.

I shortened it to just the half dozen locations we actually use, and that got it down to 9 or 10 seconds, but without the filter at all it’s still 3-5, on average.

Very thankful for the progress.

Hope you had a good Thanksgiving!

[Damion]

Take however much time you need. I’m just thrilled that you’re being nice enough to go out of your way to explore and assist.

I was thinking tonight, if I did make a patch, maybe I could do something much simpler than a whitelist. The functionality to filter events is predicated, pretty much, on people wanting to know about stuff coming up.

There are a LOT of past events. Who really cares to filter for which country they’re in?

Point being, if I could wrap the country code check in another conditional (assuming that’s still where the anti-magic is happening), it could be on the order of a few hundred events to scrape instead of a few thousand.

[Damion]

Oh, yeah, that was actually an error from the cacheing plug-in, not ECP. And I wouldn’t expect support on that. Just sharing, and keeping you in the loop as far as what I was experiencing to provide context =)

[Damion]

I installed WP Super Cache.

It seems to help once you’ve viewed the page a time or two. But there’s still the all important first impression even with it on, that can dictate bounce rates for newcomers, where it doesn’t want to load for 20-30s.

Some victory is better than no victory!

It says because this is a “faked” setup and the real, existing old site at mudrunfun.com shows different pages that they scraped versus the test one we edited our host files to access, we get this message:

Unfortunately, WordPress cannot find the file wp-cron.php. This script is required for the correct operation of garbage collection by this plugin, WordPress scheduled posts as well as other critical activities.

but presumably that changes after we go live. Since it works so well after the first load, I imagine the impact is low to this specific use case.

Thanks as always for chiming in so quickly and with so much to offer.

[Damion]

Boy, you guys sure do put a lot of work into support. These products are only around a couple hundred bucks, tops, even when you account for add-ons, and just the charges for support if you were independent from the developers all but pays for itself with how much use I’ve gotten out of you so far! Don’t think it goes unnoticed or unappreciated. The amount of automated goodies and flexibility (and the balance between them) in this whole ‘ecosystem’ of plugins is a deal at multiple times what it costs.

I’m not in a position to test this locally, but I think we’re going to go live with it as-is, and when I can test locally a little later, and try to see if that’s the issue.

I believe his game plan is to move this whole shebang to the overpowered hosting he already has. I pay 9 dollars a month for a 256MB plan, and no memory issues or CPU resource issues are recorded in cPanel, but the error log from before certainly seems to say otherwise…meanwhile he pays a couple hundred every few months for what has supported a much more bogged down bottlenecky site in the past. If it is a resource thing, maybe it’ll overcome it. If not, I’ll be happy to poke my head in and bother you guys (hopefully) one last time. What is considered “internal support?” You pass it off to a team dev over there and they scrutinize it? Kind of like an escalation?

I’m wondering how much outside caching would help, but I’d think you’d need to get the country filter to work at least one time for it to remember correctly what to store =) Maybe the database lookup itself can be cached, running a cron once a night or something to look for changes.

Thanks for the tip on the updates. We’d updated a minor release just a week or so ago, but in my plugin list it wasn’t showing them as having an update. I had to click the link at the top of the list for it to show only them, and even then, as I bulk updated, the checks in the checkboxes disappeared and that’s the only way I knew it worked. How weird!

I’m marking this as resolved because there’s likely going to be time put in before I can do as you say and test resources, and he really really really wants to bring this live and has been patient for quite a bit too as we’ve trying to get the kinks out of the old data and finish this up. If you never hear from me again, that was it and thank you immeasurably for your help.

Otherwise…I’ll be in touch 😉

[Damion]

I didn’t actually know you could use a regular Maps API key. I saw elsewhere on here someone asked about their site being slow and the response was talking about getting to use it in a newer release (4.2, I believe, which is at least where we’re at). So I went and grabbed an old one I had and now all my venues are fixed =)

Didn’t do anything for the Country filter issue but load time seems a bit better on average.

Thanks again for your continued help.

Also, your cute little baby in your avatar warms my heart.

[Damion]

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