Support

February 7, 2022 at 5:38 am

Hi Don,

The license system is used for support and one-click updates only, so for now, completely forget about the licensing as it’s irrelevant (that step is correct btw, reset when you’ve moved, but it doesn’t change anything other that the domain the key is assigned to).

Event Espresso uses custom post types for a lot of its core entities.

Events, venues, registrations, contacts, ‘people’ (to name a few of them) are all custom posts stored within wp_posts. The ID of each of those rows is then used as the foreign key in various custom tables to bind the relationship between them all.

What that means is you can’t copy ‘just’ the _esp_ tables from one site to another as then all of the foreign keys will be incorrect/invalid and the actual ‘posts’ won’t exist. You need to copy all of the tables from the original site into the new site and drop the data you don’t need from there for this to work.

(Note that again, you can’t just copy all of the tables from Site A to Site B and use something like WP Reset to ‘reset’ the wp tables as you’ve basically done the same thing and now don’t have of the EE4 posts within the wp tables)

One option some users use is to basically archive the original site on a subdomain and start fresh with Event Espresso on the new site, would that work for you?

February 8, 2022 at 2:58 am

Thank you for the information. I was not aware of the wp_posts complication.

A lot of people miss it 🙂

Using custom post types for our data is great and gives us a lot of WP native functions with that (along with us jumping through many hoops to make it as simple as we can to get to the EE data) but they do also have their drawbacks, like the above that aren’t as obvious without knowing the ins and outs of the DB structure.

The other options for moving the current content to the new site seem more convoluted than recreating the content on the new site. We offer low volume “high touch” workshops.

Yeah, it is often is easier to create. Very much dependent on the site of course but often the simplest/quickest option currently.

As long as I can copy from the prior site to the new site without license issues, I should be OK.

I honestly can’t stress this enough but please don’t be concerned with license issues when your move sites around etc.

The license is used for support and one-click updates only, so a license issue will simply prevent you from updating the site through Dashboard -> Plugins (clicking update on Event Espresso if one is available) and stops us from providing support (no license means no support). We intentionally designed it that way so that any issues on our end (for example an issue with our license server going down) doesn’t bring down all our user’s events registrations, it’s not a good experience and not what we want/use the licensing for.

Obviously, the license has meaning and we provide support for sites with licenses but we also understand that things change and sites move so are flexible with it and assess each license issue as it comes.

I suspect I’ll have other questions, but those will be separate posts based on what can find in the support system.

Sure, please do let us know if you run into any issues 🙂