Display Meetup.com Events on Rosetta Sites

[DeFries]

With more and more WordPress Meetups being organized it'd be great if we could come up with a way to easily display the actual events of a (collection of) Meetup.com accounts onto the Rosette sites.

The purpose of this ticket is to open up a discussion point for this and come with a solution in the form of a plugin for Rosetta sites.

[LucP]

Would love to work on this. The Meetup.com API looks easy enough. The big problem imho is that individual meetups have individual accounts that need to be linked.

I think the best way to do this is ask meetup-account owners to add a specific group to there meetup by which we could fetch all associated meetups.

[DeFries]

Replying to LucP:

The big problem imho is that individual meetups have individual accounts that need to be linked.

Which is why it makes sense to create a UI where you can add as many events as needed. From that array of meetups the scheduled events should be gathered displayed.

[LucP]

Replying to DeFries:

Which is why it makes sense to create a UI where you can add as many events as needed.

Any idea on a UI? What I'm proposing is using a public meetup-category we can read per rosetta site. That way meetup owners don't all have to authenticate from .org to there meetup page...

[DeFries]

I think some moderation is going to be needed to avoid unwanted behaviour. So, a settings page with a text field where you basically paste the URLs (one per line) should be the first step to go IMO.

[samuelsidler]

Isn't this partially / mostly covered by the community hub project?

Fwiw, there's already an ​events plugin used on make/community. I wouldn't want a new plugin on Rosetta. We should either use the current events plugin or (preferably) wait for the community hub project.

[DeFries]

Replying to samuelsidler:

Isn't this partially / mostly covered by the community hub project?

I haven't seen anything on that project covering this particular use case, but I'd love a link if you have one?

Fwiw, there's already an ​events plugin used on make/community. I wouldn't want a new plugin on Rosetta. We should either use the current events plugin or (preferably) wait for the community hub project.

Though we are talking about events in both cases, what we're talking about here is some automated version of pulling events organized by approved Meetup.com groups. In my mind those are two different things. Having said that, if it makes sense to add this functionality to that plugin that by all means we should do that.

[samuelsidler]

Replying to DeFries:

I haven't seen anything on that project covering this particular use case, but I'd love a link if you have one?

Not in particular, but it was discussed during the mockups. Would discussing with @miss_jwo as I'm almost positive that considering locale sites was part of the discussion. (​Logs are here.)

Though we are talking about events in both cases, what we're talking about here is some automated version of pulling events organized by approved Meetup.com groups. In my mind those are two different things. Having said that, if it makes sense to add this functionality to that plugin that by all means we should do that.

That's exactly what the plugin does: pulls in events from approved Meetup.com groups.

[DeFries]

Replying to samuelsidler:

That's exactly what the plugin does: pulls in events from approved Meetup.com groups.

Great! How can we get that added to the Rosetta sites and test? Where does the code live for this plugin? Does it work via a shortcode by any chance?

[iandunn]

Replying to DeFries:

Where does the code live for this plugin?

It's in the Meta repo, and it's already is pulling all official events -- including their location -- so it seems like that may provide all the data you need, without needing a UI for anything.

Does it work via a shortcode by any chance?

It does. So, maybe it just needs to accept a new shortcode parameter for a location, and then that would be geolocated to a set of coordinates, and the list would be restricted to events within X kilometers of that point? e.g.,

[official-wordpress-events restrict-location="Berlin, Germany"]

(There's probably a better name for that parameter, but I can't think of one at the moment)

[atimmer]

The code in the plugin only displays meetups that are connected to the WordPress meetup.com account. This can result in not all WordPress meetups being displayed.

The specific case I see this being a problem is with the dutch meetups, we've manually created ​a list of meetups in the Netherlands. If the shortcode would be restricted to only meetups in the Netherlands from that list only the one in Amsterdam and Rotterdam will show. There are meetup groups that can't or don't want to be part of the chapter program.

Would it make sense to add a shortcode parameter where custom meetup URL's can be added? @samuelsidler can you comment on this?

[iandunn]

The code in the plugin only displays meetups that are connected to the WordPress meetup.com account.

It's intentionally designed that way, because we don't want to promote groups that won't agree to ​the 5 good-faith rules. That protects the project from being associated with people who would take advantage of WordPress' popularity for their own financial gain, etc.

There are meetup groups that can't or don't want to be part of the chapter program.

If they choose to not become official, then they shouldn't get official recognition.

If they want to be official, but there's something blocking them, they should reach out to @chanthaboune, because there's probably a way we can bring them into the fold.

[dd32]

It's intentionally designed that way, because we don't want to promote groups that won't agree to the 5 good-faith rules. That protects the project from being associated with people who would take advantage of WordPress' popularity for their own financial gain, etc.

Many meetups do agree to those rules and have lived by them for a lot longer than the "official" meetup accounts have existed, they're just not part of the foundations meetup account, usually due to existing for a significant amount of time prior to that program beginning. They should really be treated as a first-class citizen and not discriminated against just because the Foundation is not the entity paying the meetup dues.

[iandunn]

Many meetups do agree to those rules and have lived by them for a lot longer than the "official" meetup accounts have existed, they're just not part of the foundations meetup account, usually due to existing for a significant amount of time prior to that program beginning. They should really be treated as a first-class citizen and not discriminated against just because the Foundation is not the entity paying the meetup dues.

AFAIK what I said above is the Community Team's official position on it, but of course you can always try and change their minds or ask for an exception. They mostly don't follow Trac, so I think the best thing to do would be to publish a post on make/Community and make the case for your position.

As a side note, I'm not saying that all groups have to be on Meetup.com. The official-wordpress-events plugin already supports pulling events from multiple sources, and it can be extended to support even more. As long as there's an API of some kind, we have the ability to pull in events from whatever platform an official group wants to use.

[samuelsidler]

Politics aside – they should be handled directly with the community team in #events – this needs a patch that adds the relevant parameter. After that, we'll need to deploy it on Rosetta sites for their use.

[casiepa]

WordPress promoting meetup.com as a means to create and maintain the community, I think having an automated way on Rosetta to display upcoming meetings would be a real benefit and time-saver.
FWIW, for getting meetup events I don't see any need to have a dedicated account. I'm getting the json file without any issue from existing meetups (see ​http://wp-info.org/events-fr/ and ​http://wp-info.org/cal-it/ ).
The only input I need to give is a list of names (like 'Parma') and the URLs (www.meetup.com/WordPress-Meetup-Parma) and from there I'm getting the programmed meetups. I'm taking both the 'Foundation' and the other existing ones to list them.
Willing to share all needed info.
Pascal.

[casiepa]

Hi,
How to continue on this one ?

Should it be a parameter of the current shortcode or a new shortcode ?
Can it be called [official-wordpress-events where the word 'official' would probably mean a meetup group under the Foundation ? If so, then we can work on extra parameters.

If not, do you want to keep the current one and a [local-wordpress-events with the meetup group name as a parameter and maybe a display name ?

[iandunn]

A couple of us are planning to work on a widget next week that will allow a visitor in any location to view events in their area. I think that will help move us closer to the goal of this ticket, and would be a better approach than modifying the shortcode.

I'll post a link to the code here once it's in a usable state, and then I think we'll have a better idea of the best way to move forward.

cc @miss_jwo since this might impact the patch you were talking about.

[iandunn]

The widget I mentioned above ​is available now. The source code is ​in the plugin repo, but people here might be more interested in ​the new API endpoint that powers it.

• You can pull events within a radius of a city, e.g., ​https://api.wordpress.org/events/1.0/?locale=de_DE&timezone=Europe/Berlin&location=Wien
• Or all events within a country: ​https://api.wordpress.org/events/1.0/?country=DE

Other options are available too, check the docs linked above for details.

The official-wordpress-events plugin pulls the data from the WordCamp.org and Meetup.com APIs, then saves it in a database. Then api.wordpress.org/events queries the database for the events.

[zodiac1978]

@iandunn If I try to use the shortcode on our rosetta site, I just get the code displayed:

[official-wordpress-events restrict-location="Berlin, Germany"]

As @DeFries is asking:

How can we get that added to the Rosetta sites and test?

The widget is a great solution and it is working great here in Germany. There are more meetups than ever and the widget is boost on attendees.

Oh, and BTW: Wien is in Austria, not in Germany ;)

​https://api.wordpress.org/events/1.0/?locale=de_DE&timezone=Europe/Berlin&location=Wien

[iandunn]

It sounds like the plugin needs to be installed and network-activated. I'm not familiar with the processes for Rosetta sites, but I'm guessing the team that's responsible for them (Polyglots? Meta?) would need to approve that change first. After that, though, it'd be simple to do.

[iandunn]

Replying to iandunn:

I'm guessing the team that's responsible for them (Polyglots? Meta?) would need to approve that change first. After that, though, it'd be simple to do.

Er, nevermind, we can't activate it on another site in it's current form, because we don't want the cron job running on multiple sites. Before it can be activated elsewhere, we'll need to add some code that makes sure the job only runs on make.wordpress.org/community.

The shortcode can be activated on any site, though. The code that pulls events from the database might need to be tweaked to look at the right database (since Make and Rosetta use different ones, IIRC). That might not turn out to be an issue, though, since IIRC HyperDB makes the tables from all the databases globally accessible.

[zodiac1978]

@iandunn Any news on that? Is it possible now to add meetup.cpm events on Rosetta sites?

[iandunn]

As far as I know, the issues in comment:25 are still blockers. They're relatively straight forward to fix, but I have a lot of other priorities right now, so I think someone else will need to take it on.

[zodiac1978]

@iandunn Any news on that? Still no time? Can you point to the right place where to fix this? Is this open source or do we need someone with higher permissions?