Modern Events Calendar - a hot mess

Support
#1

The more I mess with the Modern Events Calendar, the more I question if this was a plugin you guys should have packaged, as you guys usually pick pretty reliable ones, and this one doesn’t seem to fit the bill. It does some cool things, but it’s plagued with bugs, especially in the booking system. And these aren’t things that I’m specifically doing wrong, but like I’ll change a setting and it will break another function. You guys helped me figure out one thing that was wrong, but it wasn’t anything I’d done wrong, but rather a patch you guys gave me to a bug it had. So other than that, here’s my main two issues right now:

  1. I installed the WP Mail SMTP plugin because emails were not consistently going through to either admin(s) or the person booking the event and MEC doesn’t include any settings to handle that other than specifically WHERE each type of notification goes. It doesn’t have any “reply-to” settings or anything like that, which is ridiculous. That said, once I added that plugin on, NO emails were going through, and when you submit a ticket purchase, it just sits there spinning and never confirms that the booking went through, even though it shows up under Bookings, so it actually is.

  2. I mentioned this in that other thread, but when I activate the Google Recaptcha, it doesn’t work on desktop. Works fine on mobile though. But on desktop, it doesn’t even show the “I am not a robot” text.

All that said, I know it’s not your fault it doesn’t work, it’s the developer’s. But it’s frustrating that most of their support forums on Codecanyon tells users to submit a ticket, so none of the answers to issues are listed online except for in these Apex forums, which is scarce because you guys are troubleshooting so many other issues with your own tools.

#2

Hi there,

Thanks for posting in.

  1. The mail sending process is done with Wordpress, and it’s dependent on PHP/Host mail feature. https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/wp_mail/. The WP Mail SMTP is just a plugin to let Wordpress use another mail processing system (another server), example, if you use Google SMTP then it will use google mail service to send emails. Needing an SMTP server only means that your host mailing service isn’t properly working.

Try installing this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/check-email/ and send some test emails (but your SMTP plugin should be inactive since it’s testing your host mail service).

  1. Would you mind clarifying on which form the captcha isn’t displaying? Please provide a sample URL, it works on my installation.

Thanks!

#3

Ok, so since I posted, here’s an update on some things I did and the results, as well as some new issues:

  1. On the SMTP plugin, I changed it back to PHP and the emails started sending again, so I’ll just go with that for now.

  2. Let’s disregard the Captcha for now. I can’t test it until after this event passes on the 27th. It’s not a dire need at the moment, so we can revisit it when I can activate it and not worry about it affecting many people.

Now…the new issues:
3) The admin emails are not sending. I’ve tried having these sent to several different email addresses and none of them are coming through (checked spam filters as well). My workaround was making the booking confirmation email a little less specific to the attendee and more generic to where it’s useful to both the Admin AND Attendee, and having that sent to both the Attendee and Admin. That seems to work fine for now and I’ll just have to settle for the Booking Notification section working fine, but the Admin Notifications section not being operational.

  1. Now here’s the BIG one…what’s the point in custom fields if you can’t add them to emails? I added a field for “Business/Organization” for the attendee to fill out, but there’s no way to put those field results in an email notification. It appears the only way to check the custom entrees is to login to the backend and look at each booking individually. That is ridiculously tedious for the customer I built this for and they will likely not be satisfied with that process. It would help a little bit if there was a way to export all of the bookings for a certain date, but there’s absolutely NO export feature for bookings. The customer needs to receive an email notification that has all of that information about the attendee so they can easily mark it down on their end.

  2. When an attendee registers for an event, it is creating them a user profile on the backend. This creates an onslaught of issues. For one–Once an attendee has registered for an event once, their email auto-populates their name field in the email notification. Seems like not so big a deal, right? Well, here’s the thing…if the person filling it out selects more than one attendee, they must enter a unique email for each attendee, which doesn’t make sense, because often for these type of things the other attendee is like a plus-one (an employee or spouse) and they may share an email or something like that. Or if it were for a group of people, say kids, and the adult is booking for a group, he/she would need to have an email for every kid. If that person tried to put in JUST their email on all of the attendees, the system sees that “oh, I see this email already has a registered username, so I’m going to use that when I generate this email notification.” As you can imagine, the customer receiving an email notification from the same attendee multiple times would be confusing. They wouldn’t know if it were multiple attendees or an error in the system producing duplicate email notifications, because to the customer, the emails notifications will all be the same for any person that listed the same email for multiple attendees.

  3. The “Download Invoice” link doesn’t work on any instance of it. You click on it and it opens an error page. I had a friend that was attending this event go through the process of booking for this event, and she confirmed as well that the link doesn’t work.

All in all, the booking feature is on the verge of being something really awesome, but I wish I knew it was as half-baked as it is before I spent a whole day integrating it into this customer’s website. I do think their developers aren’t quite as invested as you guys are in making sure you address bugs and do adequate testing before releasing products, as this thing lacks a lot of basic features and polish that I come to expect from Themeco.

#4

Hey There,
​
​To assist you better with this issue, would you mind providing us the url of your site with login credentials, only if necessary, so we can take a closer look?

(Only if necessary)
To do this, you can create a secure note with the following info:
– Link to your site
– WordPress Admin username / password
​
Thank you.

#5

The website is tw3lubbock.com

#6

Hey @promofuse,

For issues 3 and 6, this is most probably due to your server and/or WordPress setup. I’d recommend that you set a staging site in a different server and give us full WP Admin and FTP access because it is risky to troubleshoot in your live site.

For issues 4 and 5, this something that we could forward to Webnus as they have control over the design and functionality of Modern Events Calendar. Right now, regretfully, we are not able to provide a solution for this as this would require custom programming.

But, for:

Bookings has an export feature. See http://webnus.net/dox/modern-event-calendar/

Thanks.

#7

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