Duplicate Event Category

[Bob]

I named an Event Category slug, and WordPress appended a -2 to it. When I tried to rename it back, a message indicated that Category already existed. It does exist as Post Category, but not as an Event Category. And I have other Category slugs that exist in both places.
Any idea where I should look for the duplicate? I had another Calendar plugin installed and just deactivated, so I activated that one again, but it does not contain a duplicate Event Category.

[Rob]

Hi again Bob. On this one…so you don’t see that slug in use anywhere under “Event Categories”, “Venues” or “Organizers”? And what about “Tags”? Just want to make sure I’m aware of all the elements here so I can try to diagnose this for you.

[Bob]

Correct, that slug is not in any of the places you listed.

[Bob]

Also used the Export/Import plugin to export all content to an XML file, and search does not find a duplicate of the problem category anywhere. For one of the two categories which has this problem, it doesn’t even have a matching Posts Category either, so the conflict isn’t there.

[Bob]

I also tried removing the existing events from one of the categories then renaming the category, but that didn’t make a difference.

[Jonah]

Hi Bob,

Something sounds fishy here. Were you ever running any other event related plugin? It could be that that plugin, after removing it, did not delete all it’s data. Other things to check are:

1. Are you running the latest version of WordPress.
2. Are you running the latest versions of our plugins (2.0.6)
3. Have you tried deactivating all other plugins to rule out a conflict?
4. Have you tried reverting to the Twenty Eleven theme to see if it’s something with your theme?

Try those steps and let us know what you find.

Thanks,
Jonah

[Bob]

WP 3.3.2 and Events Calendar 2.0.6.

I agree, though, it sounds like something lingering from another plugin. That’s why I reactivated the one and checked its categories, but these 2 categories were not among them. Another was completely removed by another admin, so I couldn’t see what might have been created there.

Haven’t tried deactivating all other plugins or reverting theme. We’re in the process of migrating the site, though, so I might not get to try that for a while. Wondering if I might need to manually query the database, which I’m not looking forward to.

[Bob]

I fixed one of the two by re-activating a previous calendar and deleting all its content and categories. I’m starting to suspect the other might be from yet a third calendar that was uninstalled already. So we may have to reinstall that even just to check and see if there is content to delete.

[Jonah]

Hi Bob, I would agree, it sounds like data that was not removed by the other plugins upon deactivation. Hopefully you can get it worked out. Let us know if there’s anything else we can do for you.

– Jonah

[Bob]

Man, I don’t know where else to look. I reinstalled that other calendar, but it did not reveal any existing posts or categories, so I uninstalled it again, and I still can’t rename that one.

[Jonah]

Hi Bob,

You’ll need to dig deeper, likely into the database itself to try and track this down. You might even try starting from scratch and slowly migrating things over one piece at a time. I’m not sure what else to tell you…

– Jonah

[Bob]

Bear with me as I’m new to some of these terms, but it appears that maybe tribe_events_cat will reuse an existing term_id in some situations, but will create a new one in others?

Looking at wp_cms_term_taxonomy, I see that some tribe_events_cat rows have a term_id that matches one from a category, but this particular one has a unique term_id. As do several other tribe_events_cats which don’t have “matching” post categories.

Is it possible that for any Event category/slug I create *after* I’ve created a post category with that same slug, they’ll be able to share the slug, but if I create in the other order, they won’t be able to?

Given the current situation, do you guys know the cleanest way to clean up? Simplistically, I’d like to just change the term_id in the tribe_events_cat, but I suspect it isn’t that easy.

Also, it would be nice if we could know how to prevent this from happening in the future.

Thanks for your assistance. (And BTW, Rob’s help on the WordPress forum is part of why we moved from free to pro.)

[Rob]

Hey there Bob. Thanks for jumping over to PRO; glad to see you made the switch 🙂 Just in case Jonah didn’t see the follow-up here (we’ve been having some weirdness with the email notifications as of late, which we’re working on now)…I have passed this his way again. You should get a response here sometime today.

[Jonah]

Hi Bob,

I’m not really sure the answer to your question and have asked another dev to come in and take a look. Stay tuned.

– Jonah

[Bob]

Still tuned….

[Author]

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