[Plugin: All-in-One Event Calendar] Deletes old events from Google calendar

1 – That’s an interesting issue. I will have to check to see what’s going on.
2 – I guess what you are trying to say is that ai1ec imports only events from todays date? If so, that’s how we designed it. Is there any specific reason to include events that occurred in the past and are not relevant?
3 – We didn’t cease any bug report submissions – you are wrong about this. All I said was that I will not be able to answer any questions on WP Forums while we work on the new version. If you want to submit bugs, you will need to use trac.the-seed.ca
I wish I could fix all issues with a single click, unfortunately it doesn’t work like that.

Cool.

1. I thought I submitted a ticket on this a couple of weeks ago, but I can’t find it at trac.the-seed.ca, so thanks for having a look.

2. No. What seems to be happening is AIO Events Calendar deletes past events from my Google Calendar when the two do their daily sync. The frustration comes with (1) having all past events deleted from my Google Calendar (I like to be able to access this info when I have to write annual reports) and (2) having visitors to the site not be able to see the past events that my organisation has hosted. Here is where my calendar is posted, and here’s the original Google calendar. You’ll notice that as the events pass they disappear from my Google Calendar. The only events that are deleted are those that are shared publicly and, therefore, synced with the AIO calendar. All of my private meetings, etc do not get deleted when the date passes. From what I can gather based on Google searches, this is not an uncommon problem with devices and programs that sync with Google calendar, but I can’t seem to find where the problem lies.

3. As for the bug reports, I read this message on your site:

Important Notice: We are busy working on the next release of the plugin and aren’t able to accept any more bug reports, feature requests or support requests until after it’s released. Thank you for your patience!

and took it to mean that you were not accepting bug reports while you worked on the next release. My bad.

I still believe this is the best WP plugin I’ve ever used, and definitely the best calendar plugin.

1 – It may not be associated with a milestone so that’s why it is not visible, I will have to check to see. I am prioritizing items for 1.5 today
2 – I think I know where the “problem” is. Instead of excluding past events, I will make it configurable so that you can decide if you want to exclude or not past events – this should solve it and add more flexibility.
3 – Yes, the message is misleading. It needs to say that we cannot work on new submissions until after the release and provide support for those tickets.

I am glad you are enjoying the plugin, we are trying to make it better everyday sometimes we are able to, sometimes there is more to be desired.
Every opinion counts here.

Excellent on all counts.

One question:

On item (2), excluding past events, is the plugin set up to “feed back to” Google calendar when it updates hourly, twice daily or daily? That is, have you set it up so that any events added through the WP admin interface (“Events” –> “Add New”) load back in to the subscribed Google Calendar feed?

I’m just trying to work out why the events are disappearing from my Google calendar as well as from my AIO Events calendar once those events have passed. Having thought about it, the only way I can think that AIO might be the problem is if AIO feeds events back to or talks back to the Google calender with some command that the Google calendar events should mirror the events in AIO, thereby (at present) deleting all past events from the Google calendar.

On item (2), excluding past events, is the plugin set up to “feed back to” Google calendar when it updates hourly, twice daily or daily? That is, have you set it up so that any events added through the WP admin interface (“Events” –> “Add New”) load back in to the subscribed Google Calendar feed?

No, it is always a one-way process.

If you subscribe to a feed – the events from the feed go into your WP. Your WP does not return anything back to the feed that you subscribed to – that’s just not possible.

Hi,

I am having one of the same issues as dylannickelson :

<< All-In-One Event (AIO) plugin continues to recognise future (repeat) events that I’ve deleted from my GC. Each sync between GC and AIO reinstates the deleted event in AIO. >>

Example, in my google calendar I have an event that repeats each Monday. But there are a couple mondays that we have deleted the “occurrence” for (not the “series”) … so in the google calendar the event shows on all monday’s expect the couple we have specifically deleted the repeating occurrence for. However, when we sync with AIO cal in wordpress those deleted occurrences continue to appear in AIO calendar.

Check out these two URLs on our site. One URL shows the AIO calendar and the other url shows the classic IFRAME embedded direct google calendar. In particular look at the date Mar 19 2012.

https://www.meditacionkadampaenqueretaro.org/?page_id=39

https://www.meditacionkadampaenqueretaro.org/?page_id=2121

You can see that mar 19 has only 1 all day event in the google calendar page…but on the AIO calendar page it shows (incorrectly) the additional repeating events which had been removed for that particular date.

This is a critical bug for us, as we cannot use AIO calendar unless we can be sure the calendar information is correct as our calendar instructs literally hundreds of people on when our classes and retreats are in session and not.. .so we cannot have people showing up for events that are not actually happening :):)

That said.. your plugin is AMAZING… there is nothing that even comes close to it. It is a thoughtful and kind development effort and has great usability which takes complex functionality and makes it easy to figure out and administrate. !! congratulations !… and we ever so much want to continue using it !…. but we can only do so if the calendar synching with google is 100% accurate. :))

Anything you can do to help with this is greatly appreciated. We really do not want to revert back to the old iframe embedded google calendar as our permanent calendar page if we don’t have to ! ??

Donovan

Hello again,

I should also mention another issue I supposed, but its not a ‘blocker’ to us using AIO calendar.

When we create a repeating all day event in google and then sync to AIO… the AIO calendar only shows the first day blocked. So for example if you look at our calendars (URLS in previous post), you can see that we have had to manually create the all day event on each day it happens (not being able to take advantage of the simple google feature that lets you just set an even to ‘all day’ and then put an end date 2 or 3 days out ). We can live with this… but would be nice if the AIO functionality carried the same as google..as it would save us a lot of ‘calendar admin’ work ??

Again, great plugin ! We are stoked to have found it !… help ! please !

Thanks !
Donovan

donovanacker,

I noticed that there was a problem with AIO’s handling of repeat events the first time that I entered a repeat event in GC. So, I stopped entering events as repeats in Google Calendar. Weighing up the hassle of having to enter repeat events individually, the aesthetics of AIO compared the ugliness of Google Calendar’s iframe webpage display and the features and aesthetics of other calendar plugins, I decided that it was worth sticking with AIO.

But then there’s the problem of the problem repeat events that are already in your Google calendar. Here’s a workaround that I use to “sync” GC and AIO. It will work okay if there is one GC and AIO administrator, if you only have one or two problem repeat events, and if you only need to update AIO once a weeks or so:

(0) Make sure that you’ve unsubscribed your GC feed in AIO through the WP admin interface;
(1) Update GC;
(2) Delete all events in AIO;
(3) Subscribe your GC feed in AIO;
(4) Update the GC feed in AIO;
(5) Unsubscribe your GC feed in AIO;
(6) Go to the AIO events in WP admin and delete the problem repeat event.

Now you have AIO truthfully reflecting the info in your GC. I just run through this procedure once a week. I usually don’t need to update events more often than this, and when I do I just run through the steps again. It takes one minute.

yani.iliev, it might be worth including a “never” Auto-refresh option in settings. This would permit admins to only manually update their AIO events calendar if the wish and not have to worry about AIO retrieving these problem events from their GCs automatically hourly, twice-daily or daily.

@dylannickelson
That’s a good idea about including a never option.

@donovanacker
The two issues that you described are being worked on. We are aware of them and will try to fix as soon as possible. Thank you!

yani.iliev,

thank you for your kind and quick reply. we very much appreciate your efforts to provide a great plugin for so many people !

please let us know when you have the fixes ready… and ..if you need a beta tester just let me know .. I would be happy to test it out for you on our mirror dev site etc ??

dylannickelson,

thank you so much for taking the time to provide a work-around solution to our repeating event issue. it would work great as you say, if we only have a couple repeating events with few exceptions….but, nearly everything in our 15 (yep, 15 !) google calendar feeds is some sort of repeating event (classes and weekly seminars etc)… so its just too much work to manually pull out the exceptions each time we refresh. but, we do ever so much appreciate your time to try and help us ! thanks you !

donovan