Dear Webmasters:
As many of you have experienced, we continue to have issues with the RJ Web Builder Calendar plugin, a custom-developed plugin we rolled out a few years ago. The main issue stems from very large, very old calendars with several years' worth of events importing daily. These large imports have caused a backup on the server and in some cases, sites have gone down, imports were slow, or events were missed and never appeared on your site.
Since these issues first began to impact site performance in May, we made some improvements to the calendar plugin which improved the efficiency of the imports by about 30%. Even with this efficiency increase, we have continued to experience issues with big calendars.
At this time, we really need to take the health of our platform and servers into consideration and step up to a better solution. Below are three options for continued use of the calendar feature, all of which I will need your help to initiate. Please respond by October 27 th with your decision on which of the following options you would like to do:
1) Embed your calendar: Google offers you as easy way to embed an upcoming events module as well as your calendar itself. This will allow you to continue to manage your events through google and all changes will be displayed on your site in real time.
2) Manage events within site: Eliminate google altogether. If you currently use google, set up a one-time import into your site. This will bring over all current events, and moving forward, you can simply edit, update or add events within the RJ Web Builder calendar plugin in the dashboard.
3) Eliminate old events: If you wish to continue to use the plugin as is, with your daily imports set up, go into your google calendar(s) and delete as many old events as you can. We have not had any issues with smaller imports, therefore the fewer events you're bringing into the site, the better.
All of these solutions will require some work on your part. I am here to answer any questions you might have, help you figure out which solution might be best for your site or help you embed a calendar or set up an import.
Thank you for your patience and cooperation.
Joel Emerman
Senior Website Manager
jemerman@urj.org
212.452.6579 (Central Time)
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