[Tom]

Brian,

That worked like a charm.

I was able to pull down the newest version of the Plugin, recreated all necessary keys from Eventbrite, and was happy to find that all of my previous work was retained… so I’m good.

Thanks for the quick (and very accurate) advice!!

Thanks – Tom C.

[Tom]

Brian,

Thanks for your reply. I’m going to pull down 3.9.4 (as you described) and I’m looking forward to your 3.9.5 update, too. I logged into my hosting provider to see if I should upgrade to a higher level of PHP, and discovered I’m already running on PHP 5.4.40… so lets see when I upgrade the Plugin.

I’ll post a reply either way, shortly.

Thanks – Tom C.

[Tom]

Barry,

Thanks for the code snippet, but I don’t know that particular escape code well enough to predict what it will do, and that seems pretty extreme (stripping out blank spaces, converting ampersands to #038, etc.). So I’m not likely to use that as a first method to address the issue.

We just completed the “fix” on the iPhone. Though the Google calendar via the web showed only good records, the iPhone showed all of these bad records but wouldn’t let us delete them – any attempt to open them caused calendar to crash.

We deleted the Google calendar from the iPhone to clear out all of the bad records from the prior attempt along with the good records (by doing so, it was like clearing cache on the iPhone). When we then turned the Google calendar back on, all of the valid events were re-posted from Google… without any of the offending records.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier replies, I’m curious as to which character is causing the problem, and if I can be sure it is limited to the “Organizer” field. I have the ‘at’ symbol @, square brackets [], as well as dashes in the Title, and event descriptions… so I just want to be sure before I make another attempt to grab the iCal import.

Tom C.

[Tom]

Barry,

Forgot to ask in my prior reply – what are the special characters that are offending, and is it limited to “Organizer”? For instance, I have square brackets [], the “at” symbol @, and other standard forms of punctuation in titles and other fields (e.g. colon, backslashes, dashes, commas, apostrophe, etc.).

Before I start changing symbols and playing trial-and-error, any guidance you can provide would be great.

In a twist that is helping us troubleshoot, we have a Google calendar (we’ll call it “M”) that was sync’d with another Google calendar (we’ll call it “T”) that has Outlook iCal upload as its source. “M” was the destination for the Google iCal upload for All events that prompted my ticket. While every record appears to have come over to Google “M” through the iCal upload attempt, some appeared to get date-spans far in excess of the original event, most appeared to have truncated the titles, and most couldn’t be opened from Google calendar on mobile devices to compare content in the records… and therefore can’t delete them. We’re about to log in to Google “M” through the web interface to see what we can see.

I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks, – Tom C.

[Tom]

Barry,

Good to hear from you again.

Thanks for the very prompt reply… and for the clues regarding special characters used in Organizer names. I’ll take a look and see if I can clear that up so the visitors/Members can all use the same button to get all events.

I tried to follow the link you provided in your reply, but it looks like that post has since been marked “private”, so there really wasn’t anything there for me to read.

I’ll check through my Organizer names and make modifications – and I’ll know pretty quickly if that solves everything. If so, I’ll close the thread promptly. If not, I’ll let you know what happens.

Thanks Barry,

[Tom]

Casey,

Thanks – your reference/link is effectively what I was looking for – something on the Event itself to entice others to sign up based on those already booked. Based on your response, it doesn’t sound like that is on the “enhancement request” list, yet. How would I go about submitting that as a candidate?

You are also correct regarding WPEC – there is a “purchase history” tab that shows transactions that went off to PayPal (successful or not). However, we have “free” events where we skip the call to PayPal, but the User still gets a ticket and they show up on the Event record as an attendee. In that case, there is nothing on the “purchase” history for that event… and there is nothing on the Event page itself to help them either. Again, I think this is a potential “enhancement request” candidate… so any guidance you can give on how to submit a proposal for that list would be appreciated.
Thanks – Tom C.

[Tom]

I’m not entirely certain what actually happened (cause), but I know how we got around it.
After turning off Plugins one-at-a-time, it turned out that Event Pro was the culprit and was crashing the site. It appeared that my license key on your site was still showing the “demo” url used for the build. I disassociated that link, went back to my environment, and deleted the Plugin. I then reinstalled the Pro plugin, entered the keys, and it came back to life without issue.
All of my Products (tickets) were retained without issue, and everything has worked perfectly since.
I’m still stumped how the php is referring to a directory that doesn’t exist and not throwing errors… but it seems to function properly. I’ll leave that to you.
Thanks – Tom C.

[Tom]

Barry,

Hopefully you’ll all consider re-adding the “Post Restriction” block on the detail Event Edit page (where the user can choose to “block” or “unblock” the post/page… and hopefully Event).

Until then, I went out and pulled down a free plugin called “Capabilities Manager Enhanced”… which allowed me to go through the other Role levels that couldn’t see “Private” and change their permissions to see the “Private” records by unique types (so I could turn on Events without altering posts or pages).

As a result, I went through all of my Events and flagged them as Private, changed the permissions for my Contributor and Subscriber Roles to see the Events, and left all other Roles “off”… and it worked like a charm.

The Capabilities Manager Enhanced plugin comes with a backup/restore feature… and I strongly encourage anyone who reads this post and uses this tool to take a backup before you do anything else… and keep taking backups so you can recover. The plugin does offer a full “reset to default” button, but that is going back to square-1… so the interim backups would be smart. The UI is very simple and I didn’t have problems, but I can see where having this power can really mess things up.

The difference between this “roles/capabilities” solution I’m using (described above) and the possible future ability to edit the “blocked” indicator on an Event (that I’m requesting as a fix/enhancement to Events) is that the “blocked” feature will tell the visitor/user that they have to log in to see content. The Private flag makes it completely invisible and the visitor/user doesn’t even know it exists.

Again, thanks for all of your help on my issues over the past week. You guys are really quick at responding, do a great job of properly understand and answering the issues. You are a great team!!

Tom C.
(PS – I’m only living this “open” so that you can post a response as to whether the “blocked” fix/enhancement has a chance of making a future release. Feel free to close it after you post that answer).

[Tom]

Barry,
Thanks for the quick reply (as always)…
I had seen several posts around the web about which “roles” were actually open or closed when an Event was flagged “Private”, so thank you for clarifying that it is Admin/Editor only.

Given that answer and your suggestion to look to other 3rd party plugins that control permissions, I have another related question/request. Most of the ‘permission control’ plugins leverage the “Blocked” flag for Posts and Pages. I am using WP-Members (and it uses the “blocked” approach).

When in the WP Admin panel and looking at All Events, there is a column for “Blocked” on that view (but not editable). On the detail page for editing each individual Event, the field isn’t present (as it is with Posts and Pages)… so there is no way to control that flag from the UI.

I presume that when the “Public/Password/Private” option was developed, there was a decision to remove the “Blocked” indicator (since it would further complicate things). However, given your answer, it seems that the use of other 3rd Party plugins will leverage that flag and I can’t get to it.

Any chance you’ll consider returning the “Blocked” flag to be visible for Event editing in a future release or fix?

Tom C.

[Tom]

Oh – and on a potentially related front (or clue) – when I attempt to switch views to either List, Map, or Photo, the browser tab shows “Page Not Found”… yet it renders without content. The page iself has the “unblock” checkbox checked. Again, not sure if they’re related or if this is a clue. – Tom C.

[Tom]

Barry,
Thanks for the quick response and guidance. I’m not actually frustrated with the plugin (actually really like it)… more concerned that I was overlooking something.

I looked at the code snippet on the link you provided, and it does look like it would do the job. I have to tinker with the “Thank You” page to ensure I understand how that transaction/page flow will work… but I do think I understand how it will intercept the call to PayPal and definitely see how it will set the indicator properly (hopefully that is the IPN) in my database. I’m assuming the presence of a valid IPN will then allow the member to show up on your “Attendee List” (they currently don’t show since the PayPal call never responds) and then also allow the “Checkin” function to work.

I will also open a ticket with WP e-Commerce. As you noted, this is really their issue with handing off “$0 transactions” to PayPal. The code snippet pretty much proves that. Hopefully they’ll respond or have something coming in a future roll-out to fix this.

I hope you don’t mind that I would like to leave this thread open for the rest of today (or to the weekend) until I get a chance to test the downstream WPEC Tickets functions (listed above) and verify they work as I hope/designed using this code fix. Plus, if I get anything interesting back from WP e-Commerce, I’ll post it here to aid anyone else who may have the same question.

I can’t thank you enough for getting back to me so quickly and providing this solution. – Tom C.

[Author]

Posts