Works well, when it works

Hi, I’m sorry you’re having issues with the upgrades, however looking at your recent forum threads, it appears these issues have been resolved? If not let us know in the forums as our staff is around on weekdays.

See this regarding our changing in thumbnails – https://wp-events-plugin.com/blog/2014/12/05/bye-timthumb/

My review may have been a bit harsh. I stumbled across the review page on the way to posting a question about an issue that was frustrating me, hence a negative bias. Nonetheless, I have encountered some difficult-to-solve problems caused by changing settings, usually relating to event categories.

That said, I could not have achieved what I have in the time without using this plug-in.

If you have further issues, please do let us know on the forums and we’ll do what we can to help.

You can still change the rating if you change your mind ??

Some more frustrations that wasted hours of my time:

1. After changing the WordPress image ‘insert into post’ setting to ‘no link’, adding or changing category images was broken: the dialog would not close properly, and even inserting the URL directly resulted in no image when viewed on the actual site (though it did appear on the admin edit page). Seems I need to click on ‘File URL’ to get the URL for it to work, but that’s far from obvious.

2. Possibly due to WordPress import/export tools, I arrived at a situation where a custom field for a location was broken, and could not be edited or removed in the editor, so I had to create a new location (the same), set all events to this, and delete the original. The field data that caused the problem was:

a:2:{i:0;s:45:”[original_value]”;i:1;s:45:”[original_value]”;}a:2:{i:0;s:45:”[original_value]”;i:1;s:45:”[original_value]”;}

(where [original_value] was the value that was put in). Don’t know what added all the extra crud, but it essentially broke the editor.

These two sound like WP errors in both cases, possibly related to other plugins or your theme breaking this functionality in case 1. We do help in these cases on the support forums to figure out if in fact it is EM causing this but not much we can do about other plugins/themes causing the problem.

For case 2 we don’t integrate with the WP import/export tool since our CPTs have more fields outside the WP tables. That said, I don’t recognize the pattern of data you’re describing. Again though, it’s the sort of thing we’d be able to discuss further in the support forums rather than here.

Pretty much every time I have posted on the support forums, the initial reply has been to suggest I disable all other plugins and themes, without offering any other hint of an explanation.

In all cases, I have already tried that before posting; I would not be posting if I hadn’t. This just extends the turnaround of resolving an issue to the point of unacceptability, such that it is much quicker to resolve the issue by debugging the code myself.

I have posted my findings on the issues I have logged, and I hope you will consider them for bug fixes in future releases.

Problems relating to issue 1 above have been logged before, 2 years ago: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/plugin-events-manager-bug-insert-category-image-not-working-when-link-url-none

I would contend that this is not a WordPress issue per se, as there is no such issue inserting images into standard posts or pages, but perhaps an issue of compatibility between Events Manager and later versions of WordPress.

Regarding issue 2, I did use the standard WP export/import to move a DB, and this was not entirely successful, so I would largely accept that the problems were the fault of the tool. However, there is an option within Events Manager to allow custom fields, and the default is ‘off’, so I wonder if this could have played a part. I have since discovered UpdraftPlus which may be better at migrating entire databases should I need to in future.