Over the course of a year, WordCamps take place nearly every weekend. Although you can view upcoming events on WordCamp Central, a relatively new plugin exist that enables you to see upcoming WordCamps on the WordPress Dashboard.
It’s called WordCamp Dashboard Widget developed by Ajit Bohra. Once activated, a new widget appears on the dashboard that lists upcoming WordCamps. Data is retrieved by using the public JSON API available on WordCamp Central, is stored in a transient, and refreshed every day to reflect new data.
Users can adjust the number of camps shown per page, sort events by location, date, or Twitter information. You can also display this information on any post or page using the [wordcamps] shortcode. The locations are linked to the event’s official WordCamp page. The @ symbol links to the official Twitter account associated with the event and the # symbol links to the official hashtag.
During testing I noticed that the Twitter account for some events was either missing or incorrect. For example, WordCamp London links to @wcldn when it should link to @WordCampLondon. I’m not a fan of the way dates are presented in a Day/Month/Year format as I prefer Month/Day/Year.
Bohra is continuing to improve the plugin with an option to refresh data, improve data fetching, and more filtering options for 1.0. I tested the plugin on a site running WordPress 4.8 alpha and didn’t encounter any issues. If you encounter a bug or have feedback, you can submit a new issue on the project’s GitHub page.
Thanks for the write-up jeff. Some good pointers missed the date thing people have different format preferences. Would be good to format dates as specified by the user under settings rather than fixed format. Will look into those twitter handle errors. Thanks for the time and effort.