More than 5 categories in shortcode breaks site

  • If I add an ecs-list-events shortcode to a page and specify 6 categories, my entire site goes down. I get a gateway timeout and my site only comes back up after renaming my plugins directory.

    But if I edit that shortcode to only specify 5 categories, it works as expected.

    Here’s an example of what I’m trying to do: [ecs-list-events past=’yes’ order=’DESC’ limit=”999″ cat=’book-club,camps,community-activities,other,organizations,cultures’ thumb=’true’ thumbsize=’medium’ contentorder=’thumbnail, title,date’] — This makes my entire site go down.

    This works fine (removed book-club): [ecs-list-events past=’yes’ order=’DESC’ limit=”999″ cat=’camps,community-activities,other,organizations,cultures’ thumb=’true’ thumbsize=’medium’ contentorder=’thumbnail, title,date’]

    I am running the latest version of this plugin and TEC and TEC Pro. I can share my error log with support if needed.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Brian Hogg

    (@brianhogg)

    Hi @jesseamber,

    Sorry to hear you’re having issues! We utilize the function provided by The Events Calendar to fetch events. Returning 999 (or many) events takes time, and if the hosting for your website takes too long to process it and uses too many resources it can cause the site to stop responding.

    Upgrading your hosting may help, though with even 50-100 events that’s a lot of data to return and display. Decreasing the events returned, or using something like the pagination feature (in the pro version) can help avoid a crash:

    https://demo.eventcalendarnewsletter.com/the-events-calendar-shortcode/pagination/

    Cheers!

    Thread Starter jesseamber

    (@jesseamber)

    I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure that’s the issue. In my example, “book-club” doesn’t even have any events. So between my two examples, the addition of the sixth category doesn’t add to the number of events being queried/displayed.

    I do believe I tried the examples above with a limit of 9 and had the same problem — it worked fine with 5 categories, but the addition of a sixth broke the site. Also note that it didn’t seem to matter which of the categories I removed.

    I can test again this evening with a limit of 9 to confirm that it doesn’t fix the problem.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by jesseamber.
    Plugin Author Brian Hogg

    (@brianhogg)

    Understood! Since we’re using the method from The Events Calendar themselves, and we’re not able to replicate it on our site (even using 8 categories), it’s not something we’d be able to fix.

    We can mention it to the team at The Events Calendar, but there may be another plugin or theme on your site that is causing too many resources to be used while fetching events. It would be good to eliminate that possibility, which you can find out using the following steps:

    1. Ensure you have a backup of your site in case there are any issues when disabling/enabling plugins or your theme
    2. Disable all plugins (except your calendar plugin and this plugin), and switch to a default theme like Twenty Twenty then verify the issue is resolved. You might need to add the shortcode to a new page if you’re currently using a page builder.
    3. Re-enable your plugins and switch back to your previous theme one by one verifying if the issue is still occurring, and note which one causes it to break

    If you let us know which plugin/theme causes the issue we may be able to come up with a workaround, but most likely you’ll also need to contact the theme or plugin author and have them fix the issue.

    Cheers!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘More than 5 categories in shortcode breaks site’ is closed to new replies.