Last night I noticed that the Lanyrd event info that was meant to be listed in my blog sidebar was no longer working. I was, at the time, using the My Lanyrd Widget which was up to a time working well… but then I noticed it had just stopped working.
I had a quick browse on the Lanyrd site and noticed that had some official JS and code which could be used to display a badge on your site showing pretty much the same info as the above mentioned widget had been doing.
And so, after an hour or so of coding the Lanyrd Splat Widget plugin for WordPress was born. I immediately requested a repo on the WordPress.org site and as soon as this was approved my checked in the code and the Lanyrd Splat Widget was launched!
The plugin has settings for the maximum number of events to show as well as the format and of course the Lanyrd username of the info to use.
The plugin pulls the info from Lanyrd every time the page is loaded, which is obviously not ideal. I had toyed with the idea of using the ics feed which Lanyrd provides and then using transient storage inside WordPress to temporarily cache the data. I decided to not use this for the time as the route I’ve taken pulls only the data needed and also supports richer data. My view on this may change in time… we will just have to see how this performs.
The Lanyrd Splat Widget can be downloaded from the official WordPress.org plugin repository.
Thanks for this plugin!
To make it work more like a “normal” widget in our theme and less like a special badge, I had to change the code slightly:
echo $before_widget;
if ( !empty( $lanyrd_title ) ) { echo $before_title . $lanyrd_title . $after_title; };
if ( $contents ) echo $contents;
echo $after_widget;