Dear WP Events Manager Team,

We recently completed a complex migration from The Events Calendar to WP Events Manager and wanted to share feedback on some major roadblocks we encountered, particularly around the migration plugin and event import process.

1. Migration Plugin: No Documentation or Support

• There is virtually no documentation available for the official migration plugin. This left us guessing at field mappings and behavior.

• For example, it was unclear that fields like _event_venue_ids must be used instead of the event_location field to assign venue relationships. This is critical information that should be in the docs.

• The plugin does not remove unused taxonomies (tags, categories, types), leading to thousands of orphaned or malformed terms from test imports.

2. Import Issues: No Pipeline, No Comma, No Anything

• There was conflicting information from your support and the plugin’s behavior regarding how to separate multiple tags/categories. Support advised using commas, but neither commas, semicolons, nor pipes worked consistently.

• Ultimately, WP All Import worked — but only after deep manual configuration including:

  • Assigning a unique identifier (not easy for new data).

  • Explicitly setting taxonomy split characters.

  • Mapping each taxonomy and meta key manually, including event_venue_ids (for venue assignment) and standardizing country codes.

3. Venue Assignment Only Works in Admin UI

• Even when importing correct venue IDs, events were not assigned properly until edited in the admin UI.

• This points to either a caching issue, object meta not being refreshed, or a bug in how imported relationships are persisted.

4. Broken Tag/Category Behavior

• During CSV import tests, the plugin created malformed tag names like “40710”, or joined multiple tag names as a single string if not perfectly formatted.

• When tags were deleted in the admin UI, they continued to be referenced by new events, suggesting stale taxonomy data or failure to clean up term relationships.

5. Lack of Field Reference Documentation

• There’s no centralized list of accepted meta keys (_event_country, _event_venue_ids, etc.).

• No guidance on the difference between postmeta and taxonomy assignments.

• No explanation of how the plugin expects serialized data (e.g. for venue arrays) or how it handles single vs multiple values.

We were able to make it work eventually — but only by inspecting the database, trial-and-error with WP All Import, and writing custom cleanup tooling for taxonomy bloat and transient handling. It shouldn’t have to be this hard.

We’re happy to provide more feedback or even contribute documentation examples if that would help your team improve the experience for others. Please consider these concerns seriously.