How I Discovered a Bug in The Events Calendar WordPress Plugin

The Events Calendar is an event management plugin active on over 800,000 WordPress websites. It’s a great plugin that I used on multiple projects and will continue to use in the future. This is how I discovered a bug that likely impacts only a few users in specific circumstances.

Short version: As of this video and post, a filter used by The Events Calendar strips URL parameters before the URL is passed to the native WordPress url_to_postid() function when using WP-CLI.

A few takeaways:

  1. Always backup your website before running any code that deletes data, no matter how confident you are in your process.
  2. No matter how trusted a plugin may be, there can still be issues.
  3. Be a good citizen of the WordPress community by reporting issues to plugin developers so that everyone benefits.

As I mention in the video, I have reported this issue to the plugin developer. I’m confident that it’ll be resolved. I’ll update this post as I hear back from them.

Joel McDonald

Joel McDonald has over twenty years of experience in web design and development. He founded Comit Strategies, now McDonald Web Works, in 2012, where he provides web design, development, hosting, support, and consultation to small-to-medium-sized businesses and organizations.