[Tim Stringer]

I’m happy to report that development on the event reminder’s functionality for my Holistic Productivity website is complete (the website itself will be launching very soon).

Email reminders are automatically sent out based on the information contained in custom fields, combined with the standard Events Calendar fields.

I’ve attached a screenshot showing the custom fields that were defined. I’m using the excellent Advanced Custom Fields plugin to present a friendly interface and to help ensure data integrity (e.g. make sure that text isn’t entered into a number field). In my case, the custom fields are:

• Pacific Daylight Time (true/false) – Set based on whether PDT is in effect.
• First Reminder (hours) – How long in advance of the start time to send the first reminder.
• Second Reminder (hours) – How long in advance of the end time to send the second reminder.
• Additional Information – Information specific to this event to be included in the reminder emails.
• Zoom Meeting ID – All my events are virtual and each has a unique Zoom meeting number.

The code that my developer, Henry wrote automatically generates reminder emails that consist of predefined text combined with the event information. He added some nice touches. For example, if the reminder is for an event that is taking place tomorrow the subject will contain the word TOMORROW. If it were a 2+ days away, the subject instead contains the date of the event.

If you’re looking for something similar, feel free to drop Henry a line at anri.tora at gmail dot com. You can either work with him directly or through Codeable.io. I’ve also encouraged him to apply to be an official developer/customizer for the The Events Calendar.

I hope this helps…and let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers,
Tim

[Tim Stringer]

Hi Jason,

For the past month I’ve been working with a developer to implement reminders for Events Calendar.

In my case, reminders are sent out 2 and 24-hours before the start time of the event. In addition to pulling data from the regular event information (including the event name and start time) the code that generates the email can pull custom fields. For my use case, the custom fields include a text block containing event-specific information and the meeting ID (most of my events are conducted online using Zoom and there’s a different meeting ID for each event).

The scripts that takes care of sending our email is triggered by cron. Depending on your hosting setup, the script may only be run if there’s activity on the site. If you have a low traffic site then the script might not be triggered at the exact time the reminder is set to go out. For relatively high traffic sites this is likely a non issue. My site is hosted through WP Engine and I’m planning to use their “alternate cron” facility, which will ensure that the script is run every minute.

We’re moving into the final stages of testing and I expect that work will be wrapped up on this project by Friday. I’ll see if the developer is interested in taking on some more work in this area (I suspect he is). In the meantime, let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers,
Tim

[Tim Stringer]

You’re very welcome, Nico.

Once the project is done, I’ll suggest that the developer submit an application to be listed on your customizers list…assuming I’m happy with the work he’s done (it’s going great so far).

It might be worth checking in with the customizers you currently list to make sure they’re still available for this type of work. I emailed a couple of them on September 23 and still haven’t received any response.

[Tim Stringer]

Update:

I haven’t received a response from any of the people I contacted on September 26, 2016.

I’ve since had a great chat with one of the developers at Codeable.io and have hired him to implement the event reminder functionality. He has previous experience customizing The Events Calendar and I’m confident that he’ll deliver as promised.

I’m expecting this work will be completed within the next couple of weeks. If you could leave this thread open, I’m happy to report back.

[Tim Stringer]

Sounds good. Thanks Nico.

I reached out to two of the developers on your list last week and am waiting to hear back.

I’ve had some contact with the author of the WooCommerce Follow-up plugin in the past and plan to email him today. It’s a bit of a long shot, but doesn’t hurt to ask.

I’ll update this thread once I have more information to share.

Cheers,
Tim

[Tim Stringer]

Thanks for your message, Nico!

I’ll try contacting customizers from the list to see if any have implemented something similar to what I’m looking for.

Also, good to know about the Better Notifications extensions. I’ll drop them a line to see what they have to offer.

I also use the WooCommerce Follow-up plugin to schedule things like subscription renewal reminders. It’s possible that it could also trigger reminders about events…but this is a bit of a long shot as I don’t see any indication that this plugin is extensible.

I’ll be happy to report back on any findings. If it works for you, perhaps we could leave this thread open until I complete my research (likely about a week, hopefully less).

Cheers,
Tim

[Tim Stringer]

Great. Thanks again, Cliff.

[Tim Stringer]

Thanks for your prompt reply, Cliff and good to hear that Event Tickets Plus will likely fit the bill.

One other question. How much control do I have over the formatting of the confirmation and reminder emails?

[Tim Stringer]

Thanks for the update, Barry. Given that this is a serious issue that could result in a loss of sales/income for myself and others I encourage you to release this as a secondary maintenance release rather than waiting for the next monthly update.

[Tim Stringer]

Thanks for the follow-up, Barry and good to hear that a high priority fix was in the works. Do you have an ETA on the next release? The sooner the better given that this is a serious issue.

Generally speaking, is there a webpage that contains a summary of known issues? If I had know about this bug ahead of time I could have taken temporary measures. Instead I sent out a Tweet letting people know that it wasn’t too late to register, not realizing that the Eventbrite button had disappeared from the event. Confusing for users and embarrassing for me.

Cheers,
Tim

[Tim Stringer]

I ran into this time zone issue earlier in the week. My events, which were imported from Eventbrite, were at 10am and 3pm PDT and the Eventbrite registration disappeared 3 hours before the event time, causing confusion amongst users and some lost registrations. I verified that the time zone is set correctly on both WordPress and Eventbrite and that ticket sales were available until the event time.

Has this bug been fixed in 3.8? If not, is there a workaround? This is a very serious issue for me (and I’m sure others) that impacts both revenue and reputation. Let me know if you need further information from my side.

Thanks!

[Tim Stringer]

Jonah — Thanks for the detailed explanation. One source of confusion for me (and I expect others) is that some of the documentation for Events Calendar doesn’t seem to have been updated for Events Calendar 3. For example, the current “Doing template overrides” document instructs users to put the theme overrides in an “events” folder in the theme — I discovered later that this folder is now called “tribe-events”. Before releasing EC 3 it would have been good to go through the documentation and note the differences in this new version and/or have more detailed information for people who are upgrading. I appreciate that you can’t deal with each user/theme individually…but having some clear and accurate documentation can go a long way. Also (if you haven’t already) it wouldn’t hurt to do some testing with some popular themes just in case there are issues in EC 3 that didn’t surface when testing with the default theme.

[Tim Stringer]

I ended up restoring a backup and reverting to Events Calendar 2.0.11 in the process. The event count is now displaying correctly…which confirms that the count got thrown off either during or after the upgrade to Events Calendar 3.0. I’m going to stick with 2.0.11 for now and will revisit the upgrade to 3.0 once the dust settles.

[Tim Stringer]

Cynthia — Thanks for your comments. I ended up restoring a recent WordPress backup…and in the process reverting to Events Calendar 2.0.11. I’ve been in touch with the theme developer (Progression Studios) and will look at upgrading to Events Calendar 3 once I have more compatibility information from him.

[Tim Stringer]

Jonah — FYI: I ended up restoring a recent WordPress backup…and in the process reverting to Events Calendar 2.0.11. I’ve been in touch with the theme developer (Progression Studios) and will look at upgrading to Events Calendar 3 once I have more compatibility information from him.

[Author]

Posts