Recurring event problem / question

I’m sure I have explained this before on the WordPress.org support forum for the plugin, and/or elsewhere on this forum, but I’ll repeat myself here in more detail to make it easier to find again:

This plugin started it’s life 4 years ago as another plugin at WordPress.org. I took over the web site for my son’s school PTA, and we needed a way to handle volunteer sign-ups. I found the plugin by DLS software called Sign-Up Sheets, which was the closest to having all the features we needed, and then I basically took several months over the summer to teach myself plugin development for WordPress, and I modified it and added the extra features we needed. Everyone liked it, and after my son moved on from that school, I released it to the open source public at WordPress.org.

Since then many new features have been added, and I still try to support it as much as I have time for, but I’m basically locked into the database structure of the original plugin. When I made the modifications for my son’s school, we didn’t need a Google Calendar type of recurring event, because we didn’t have events where it recurred more than a handful of times during the school year.

To make a true Google Calendar type of recurring event that can have exceptions for specific dates, and start end dates, and all the various recurring options, requires a very complex database structure (do some searches if you are interested, and you’ll find many different ideas on how to do it, as it is far from simple), and not something I even thought about or was prepared to do at the time.

If I had the chance to do it all over again now after 4+ years of developing WordPress plugins, and all that I have learned, I would use an entirely different database structure, and make the whole system much more powerful and flexible. But, if I do that now, it breaks everything for the people already using it (they would have to start all over). Plus, it’s free and almost nobody donates or contributes or purchases the super cheap extensions, so it’s not putting food on the table for my family. Thus, the plugin as it stands now is already very low on my list of priorities. I provide support and bug fixes quickly, but do not have any plans to spend hundreds of hours rewriting the code for free, or adding too many more features to the existing code.

So, the recurring events are the way that they are, with dates simply stored as a comma separated list (assisted by the jQuery datePicker pop-up). Yes, there is a limit to the # of dates you can enter for a sheet before you reach the maximum size of that field, which is why you get an error if you try to save too many dates in that field. The work around is to create a sheet for one month, or a couple weeks at a time, add/edit all your tasks, and then simply copy the sheet and just change the dates, so that you have a sheet for each month or so. Yes, not ideal, but that’s a limitation of the current database structure.

You can edit the tasks for the sheet at any time (note that sheets and tasks are edited separately), and click in the dates field and edit those at any time. Delete the old/expired dates, and add new ones as needed, or modify however you see fit.

Sorry, but that’s just how it works with its current database structure. You can use it as is and work around the limitations, or you can try to find a better plugin, or, since it’s open source, you can do what I did and take several months to teach yourself how to program WordPress plugins and then modify it to work exactly the way that you want it to work (or, you can pay a developer to do it for you).

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Stephen Sherrard.

Closed – wrong forum.

Please read this: https://stephensherrardplugins.com/support/topic/please-read-before-posting/