[Plugin: All-in-One Event Calendar] ai1ec problems in multilanguage websites

Multilanguage websites don’t work well with ai1ec and I suspect with other plugins too. We are looking at WPML for now and will soon try to support more ML plugins.
I think the community will benefit from having the italian translation in the plugin so please send it to me: yani at the-seed dot ca

@andydegroo
Thanks for the feedback. Glad you found something that works for you. The idea behind ai1ec is to provide as much flexibility to the end user and most of all, support ics import/export.

I also noted that screenshots double the size of AI1EC. Do you really need all of them in distribution zip file?

That’s a good suggestion, I will try to “smush” the screenshots as much as possible.

It makes me think that the issue with Polylang is the same as with WPML – ajax calls are missing language parameter.
I’ll check polylang too when working on WPML. Thank you for the translations!

@yani.iliev
In Polylang multiple languages are accomplished as custom taxonomies and it modifies queries in pre_get_posts action hook. The plugin will set language to default language defined in plugin settings or to browser settings of site visitor if that option is activated. It also sets a cookie depending on visitors language choice.

If AI1EC was using WP_Query::get_posts() method instead of directly calling wpdb methods it would be much easier to filter events by language. I can see why it is done this way, but maybe AI1EC can be modified to include WP_Query class. It is possible to include fields of joined tables by using posts_fields filter which is applied before post select queries. Another option is posts_request filter in which plugins can modify complete SQL query.

As a proof of – here is how I use posts_fields filter to get event_date meta field in results from wp_postmeta table:

add_filter('posts_fields', 'event_posts_fields', 100, 2);
function event_posts_fields($fields, $wp_query){
	global $wpdb;
	$qv = $wp_query->query_vars;
	if( isset($qv['meta_key']) && $qv['meta_key']=='_event_startdate' )
	$fields .= ", {$wpdb->postmeta}.meta_value AS event_startdate";
	return $fields;
}

After this I can use $post->event_startdate without using get_post_meta(). Note: wp_postmeta is already JOINed by adding custom meta_query or specifying 'orderby'=>'meta_value' and 'meta_key'=>'_event_startdate' in query_vars array.

There are few other filters where Polylang modifies queries used in WP_Query class:

getarchives_join, getarchives_where;
get_previous_post_join, get_previous_post_where;
get_next_post_join, get_next_post_where;

I hope this explains the basic working principle of Polylang and will help make AI1EC compatible.

@lucabarbetti

Have you made a plugin out of your event managment system?

Yes, I have, but I created it for a project and it was created to do just what is needed. There are no recurrent events, RSVP or location functionality. Although ICS export and event microformats are implemented. I’m not willing to create another events plugin just because I don’t like how other plugins work. There are already too many out there.