Importing regions and districts

OK, so I figured part of this out. Adjusted by csv doc and now the regions show up. But the Districts still do not. I have been told that the AA version of the plugin does show them and that, in fact, when you open the dropdown of the regions, it offers to show meetings by district as an alternative view.

I have found a way around it but I keep wondering: where did the Districts go? I did have them in my csv but cannot find them anywhere…

Hi @osnicky59,

If you look under Import & Settings and then Spreadsheet Example & Specs, you will see a list of the columns that should be recognized by the importer. In there, you’ll see District and Sub District as columns. To be sure, include them after Group. Also, Group does need to be filled out when designating the district.

Please let us know if that solves your issue.

Hello!
Thanks for the reply.
I did just that. I think.
I import my groupmeetings in one big batch.
Adding the District as additional comma separate value did not trigger error messages, but the Districts table was not being filled either.
I have re-built the csv (it comes from a database and I built it so I have full control over the format) and learned the following, which I note here because it might be something that confuses other as much as me.

The spreadsheet mentions ‘address’ and then, below that, states:
“If Address is specified, then City, State, and Country are optional, but they might be useful if your addresses sound ambiguous to Google. If address is not specified, then these fields are required.”
So initially I did my csv with separated values for address, city, state and country.

I now find that it works best to put the entire address in the same column. This ensures that I can add province (I am in Canada) and zip code the way I want it. Having a ‘city’ column does not fill the ‘region’ in the plugin. Having the complete address in the ‘address’ column does and does so excellently.

When I add, to my required group meeting information, the additional column for ‘District’, however, it goes up in thin air. Nowhere to be found.

When I tried doing an import with only that column, it was not accepted by the interface, where it said to include City and something else that I have now forgotten about.

It would be nice to be able to import the District, especially when it leads to displaying the district box in the interface.

I have solved that issue by adding (D#) to the name of my groups, which enables visitors to use the free search box to find a District. But if you have a solution that enables me to upload JUST the district, that would be awesome.

Might this be because I am doing this for another 12 Step program than AA? I have noticed several differences. For instance, while we are at it, I also cannot get the group Type to upload and in the types I see in the edit mode of the interface I am missing ‘Institution’ as a meeting place as well.

What I would find super helpful if is there was some way to show a field / column mapping before import. I use an Events Calendar plugin that does that and it just makes it visually easier to see what is going wrong than with the import you offer. It works well for group meetings now that I have this part figured out… but…. still things on the wishlist!

Thanks for your help and other than the above: awesome plugin!

If you’re willing, send me the csv file to tech2serve at itstechnical dot net. I can look at it later today or this coming week.

Two files here. One is the normal upload of a group that results in correct results, but no Districts anywhere in the pluginlist. The other one a doc with just 2 district fields: is not accepted by plugin.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q2jjqxaayrdnlnk/Archive.zip?dl=0

@osnicky59,

You need to create a single csv file and add the “District” column after the “Group” column. Designation of a district requires the meeting to be a part of a group.

I only had one meeting in the list you sent me, but I added a “Group” column before “District” and named the group “Test Group”. I then imported the file.

In doing so, “District 5 – Huron Perth” was created and it shows in the meeting entry.

You’ll have to assign each meeting entry with its group name and the corresponding district. They don’t import as separate files.

Please try that and let us know.

Thank you for testing.
I do have all that information but it was not clear to me that the order of the worksheet example was important. As there is no way to check how the incoming data are mapped to the meeting data it is a bit of a blind alley. This might be worth noting on the example sheet. I will try again.

I have one more issue that makes me a bit nervous.
I have had all entries on my site (300 plus…) checked and today some came back with corrections on the postal codes. When I double checked on the website, it turned out that that Mapbox map sometimes will not accept what groups know to be the correct zipcode for a venue. This might mean that I have to do a manual check and since there is no way to navigate, when in the complete list of meetings, from one to the other from the details view, this may be a full day of work and a true headache for me.

So, two requests:
please, if at all possible, when in edit mode, give us the option to browse from group to group in detail view.

And: please explain who is right. The group and the website of the venue, of Mapbox. How do I explain this to groups when Mapbox does not accept a postal code? This can become painful when the site goes live…

Thank you for your input!

Nicky

I want to clarify one point. Only Google’s address lookup is currently used by the plugin to resolve addresses for entry into the database. We may change this is the future, but this is currently the case as Google’s data seems to be the most complete and accurate.

However, this does not mean it is perfect. But, given the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of addresses we have for meetings, the failure rate is really quite low. The majority of problems we see are because a local community knows the meeting site as at a given address and Google sees it as slightly different. Who is correct? It isn’t always clear, but if we can make the plugin do what we need it to do by using Google’s address, nobody should be any the wiser. Make sense?

For the very small number in which Google is clearly wrong, the plugin allows you to manually code an override to the address. Please see the FAQ on how to do this. In the end, I’m confident this may not be required at all, or at most a couple of times. At least, that has been our experience so far.

As far as your suggestion, would you please come over to our dev site and start an issue–>feature request to more fully explain what you’re looking for?

OK. Let’s wait and see how many will come up wrong.
I understand what you are saying. We had one in a small village and the only way to get it right was adding the name of a slightly bigger village that the other one apparently belonged to. Although I do not know that location myself, in detailed view it did look right because we saw the name of the venue building.

I will keep you posted. This will not be a District or Group site. This is an Area site with over 300 meetings, so as such the interface and the PDF Generator might not do what we want it to do and because of that we upload new District list whenever there is a revision in a group, for that District. I am hoping that there will be a better PDF Generator, one that we can have more influence on AND that can run on the found set in the meeting viewer. Is that anywhere on your list?

There is another plugin called 12-step-meeting-pdf that you might want to check out.

Unfortunately the upload instructions do not work for me. I am doing this not for an AA group but for an Al-Anon area so maybe there is that much difference between the two interfaces?

So here is what I figured out which might be helpful to others:
in the import.csv a distinction is apparently made between a MEETING name and a GROUP name. And the District is applied to the GROUP rather than the MEETING.
There is, as far as I have tried, no way to build a list of districts with the longer description. This might not be relevant to AA but it is to my area. I only have 30 districts, so I can add that once for each but it would be nice to have the option of including it in the import in the case I have to do a big batch upload like the one I did today.

My upload now works very well and I have revealed both the District filter and the Types filter. I like how things look in the detailed view as well.

I did go forward and manually checked all 304 of our venue locations’ postal code.
61 of them were different in the Google Maps detailed view from the addressed, vetted and checked, from the groups/meetings. That is one fifth. I will just let this go for now and see who spots it and then I will ask them to find out where their group postal code came from. The Maps do not accept them, change them in something else, but do show the proper location. Sometimes even by omitting the last 3 positions of the postal code.

It is still a bit weird to me. I am logging the addresses so if you need to have them with both postal codes to see if you can do something about these descrepancies that would be wonderful.

I am also included to, in future, see if I can work better with the PDF generator. Right now my lists come from my own database and maybe I will keep doing that. But the PDF Creator has perspective. But that will be for after the launch of the website.

Signing off now on yet another pre-launch exhaustive day. Tomorrow I take the day off and Thursday we are on for the launch.

The database for WordPress doesn’t care about which program is being observed.The plugin only cares that the fields used in the csv file match the specification (if they’re used or required).

You are correct that lexicon matters for us humans trying to understand what data needs to be put in a particular field. ?? In AA speak, a group is a service structure the manages the business of one or more meetings. These groups are a part of districts; these are also service structures, made up of those groups. That is why group information needs to be filled out in order to assign a meeting to a district. Since a spreadsheet (csv file in this case) is not a relational database, each row has to include all the information for the entry in the database. But this should be a one time import once you have everything right. At some point it likely may become easier to just make the edits/tweaks using the plugin’s admin interface. However, that is not always the case.

If you send me the addresses I’ll try to look at a few of them. And if you send me the final csv file you used, I’ll try importing that into my test system to see what errors I get.

OK, I understand that. And sorry for my weird typo, I think I meant ‘inclined’ instead of ‘included’ where I mention the PDF creator.

My own database is in fact relational and most entities we call groups have only one location and as such one meeting and these are usually in the same venues. So I have less groups than meetings and less venues than meetings because I keep them in their own tables. But luckily I can output these data in whatever format is needed.

I just repeated the group name in both the ‘name’ and the ‘group’ column and the page looks really good now. Very thankful to this being made available to us as a plugin. Great work!

Can you provide me with a private email location for the 61 postal codes and venues that deviate from what people believe to be correct? I am bound by confidentiality principles and cannot share them publicly as you will probably understand.

Thanks!

tech2serve at itstechnical dot net

We started to do the DNS change to make the draft site the real one.
I now have an issue with the meetings.
They show up but they I want to click to go to detail view, i get an error page.
It seems like it links to the address that was used in the draft site and I do not see how to change this. Looked in the settings, cannot find it.

How do I solve this as this means I cannot open the site up for general access yet without Detailed view.