Beautiful, amazing concept. But the plugin simply doesn't work as advertised

When I installed this plugin, I had high hopes. It’s beautifully designed, responsive to all different devices, and creates all kinds of widgets that you can insert throughout your site with different versions/sub-sets of your calendar’s events. And, the user interface is very simple, intuitive and easy-to-use.

But there’s a reason I’m giving this plugin a one-star review. That’s because there’s a HUGE flaw in it. Before I installed it, my Google Webmaster Tools control panel would report my number of Page Not Found errors each day, a number that usually numbered a few dozen to about 100. (I have a large site, so that number’s not a big one for me.)

After I began using the All-in-One Calendar, however, that number mushroomed to 5,000 pages, 7,000 pages and at last count numbered more than 78,000 Page Not Found errors. I don’t know about you, but to me that’s an astronomical jump.

The problem is that unless you go into the code and change your robots.txt to prevent excessive Googlebot crawls, Google’s spiders will try index every possible version of the calendar on your site, which will place a massive burden on WordPress calls to your database and on your hosting company’s servers.

But the plugin doesn’t come with this configuration as the default; you only find out about it once it begins causing problems. BIG problems. And once it starts, I found that the solutions the company recommended to fix it didn’t work. So there’s that.

I spent hours and hours and days and days trying to figure this out. It’s been a tremendous time sink. My advice is, unless you’re an expert at WordPress and PHP, stay away from this plugin. Or, at least make sure you are certain that your hosting company’s server is configured properly for it to work.

Also, check around the web — there’s many, many publishers who have torn their hair out trying to solve the problems this plugin causes.

Not persuaded? Read this and the comments below it: http://erichdoss.com/2013/04/15/time-ly-calendar-and-googlebot-bandwidth-issues/