It’s been quite few years for us designing & developing websites & apps powered by WordPress. Lately we have been planning to use our experience on various projects and share them in the form of useful plugins. wordpress.org repository already has many great plugins created by awesome developers around the world. So we were looking at building something which can add value and be useful both at the same time like everyone hopes for at the start. As these days we are looking forward to various WordCamps happening around, we try to keep our self updated. We saw this idea posted by Ratnesh Sonar on the forum regarding listing upcoming WordCamps on the wp-admin dashboard. We loved the idea and it was something we would love to have on our backend.

After stalking central.wordcamp.com and it’s JSON api we developed the plugin “WordCamp Dashboard Widget” with few basic features, which is now available on the plugin repository & also on github. We made it available on Github so that fellow developers can chip in and collaborate to fix issues and send pull requests for improvements and enhancements.

Currently plugin code is a single file with all the logic to keep it simple for now, which will be improved once the plugin grows. Data is fetched from the JSON API, processed & stored in transient which is updated daily with new data. Widget displays location for the wordcamp which is linked to that wordcamps homepage, date, twitter profile & hashtag respectively. Plugin will be further improved to auto fetch WordCamp data based on users location. Shortcode, widget & lot more are coming soon. Checkout the the github milestones to know more about upcoming add-ons & improvements.

WordPress community is simply awesome, when initial version of the plugin was released “Meher Bala” helped us fix a fatal issue and bugs in the plugin. She provided us access to her server to look into the issue and troubleshoot the problem. Hope people find this plugin helpful.

Also, stay tuned we are working on more WordPress awesomeness to be shared with the community 🙂