WP to twitter plugin and Events Manager event attributes

Joe thankyou for your quick response. I can see your suggestion of a custom template tag filter working to retrieve the information.

It will be a steep learning curve for my limited php and EM skills. In the absence of an existing solution or a more simple approach, if I get it working I’ll post the code here.

thankyou

[EDITED 31-7-13 15:03] There appears to be a timing/triggering issue when including placeholder information in a tweet about a new event.

Tweets for an updated event are working fine.

I have set the template for tweets for both new and updated events to be

Event updated: #title#. [[my_evt_startdate][[my_evt_location].#url#

where my_evt_startdate and my_evt_location are surrounded with doublebrackets, and defined in my funtions.php as below.

The tweet for a new event reads

Event updated: My Event Title. 31/07/2013. goo.gl/shorturl

(note the missing event location, and also that the event date is today’s date)

Making a minor change to the title of the event and publishing the change, the tweet then reads correctly:

Event updated: My Event Title2. 09/08/2013 My Location Name. goo.gl/shorturl

(note that the location has been filled in, and also that the actual date of the event is populated instead of today’s date.

So it appears the the placeholders are populated after the tweet has been triggered, and that #_EVENTDATES returns today’s date in the absence of a defined date?

My limited knowledge thinks it might be similar to the below post?
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/issue-between-events-manager-wp-to-twitter?replies=13

This is where my knowledge ends! Perhaps there is a better method of retrieving the location and start date.

additions to functions.php:

add_filter( 'wpt_custom_shortcode', 'my_evt_location', 10, 3 );
function my_evt_location( $value, $post_ID, $field ) {
    if ( $field == 'my_evt_location' ) {
		$EM_Event = em_get_event($post_ID, 'post_id');
		$mylocation = $EM_Event->output('#_LOCATIONNAME');
		return $mylocation;
    }
    return $value;
}

add_filter( 'wpt_custom_shortcode', 'my_evt_startdate', 10, 3 );
function my_evt_startdate( $value, $post_ID, $field ) {
    if ( $field == 'my_evt_startdate' ) {
		$EM_Event = em_get_event($post_ID, 'post_id');
		$mylocation = $EM_Event->output('#_EVENTDATES');
		return $mylocation;
    }
    return $value;
}

thankyou for your reply Joe,
I too don’t know enought about Events Manager to tell what is happening when an event is saved via the EM admin interface.

Luckily for me the majority of my events I will be creating via a third party import plugin, in which I can control post-insertion in the manner you suggest above. I will adjust the code and see what happens.

thanks

sorry to throw a cat amongst the pigeons, but the issue of missing placeholder info was happening on new events created from wp-admin area

wp-admin–>Events–> Add Event
Enter a title, description, (it autosaves a draft here), then a date and a location,
I then click PUBLISH button (this is the first time the event has been saved), and I get the tweet:

New Event: test2. 02/08/2013 at . http://goo.gl/shortcode

(the event start date is wrong, the event location is missing.

Still in wp-admin, I then click the UPDATE button (in the same place as the publish button), and I get the tweet

Event updated: test2. 25/12/2013 MyLocation.http://goo.gl/shortcode

(event start date is correct, event location is correct.)
(the tweet templates are the same other than the first two words).

A workaround is to simply press ‘save draft’ first, then click ‘publish’ on a new event, and this fixes the issue.

Is my use of the custom filters causing the issues? The function names ‘my_evt_location’ and ‘my_evt_startdate’ don’t exist anywhere else other than with my filters in functions.php for the theme…I don’t really know what I’m doing here

FYI I have a separate plugin that that imports events via separate process, which only tweets EM placeholder info if I save to draft first, then save_meta, then save&publish

/* new event object
$event = new EM_Event();
/*define other event attribs here*/
/* before saving event, force post to draft */
$event->force_status = 'draft';
/*save event*/
$event->save();
/* save_meta is called from within save? in case not: */
$event->save_meta();
/* play with categories, then save and publish */

$event->force_status = 'publish';
$event->save();

no probs, the workaround of saving draft first then publish is no hassle.