Background

Continuing my saga of building a better band website, I spent a lot of time smoothing out my approach to keeping the band’s schedule in line on all of the ziillion sites that list band dates.

The goals were these:

1. Have a single place to enter dates.  Two places is too many.
2. Update the various social networks with new show dates (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter)
3. Update tons of other entertainment-related sites that we have profiles on, in particular making sure ReverbNation is updated
4. Be able to show the concert dates on my personal calendar without any extra work from me.
5. Be able to show concert dates on our WordPress site in a visually-pleasing manner.

The simple answer is that I employ Artistdata as the central source of truth for all of my bands’ dates. They handle the first three very well, and you can read for yourself all the sites that they update. The details, however, warrant a lot of conversation.

I’m going through all of the pieces of this puzzle one by one. Here, I’ll discuss what I did to get my dates displaying on my website via a custom WordPress plugin.

ArtistData WordPress Widget

Once I knew that the calendar dates would get disseminated far and wide on many other sites, I turned to the question of displaying the dates on our own website.

Sure, I could have used the HTML widget that ArtistData or any number of other sites would provide for us, but with all of them I found that it would be difficult to customize the look and feel in just the right way.  I could do it, but it might take just as much time to code my own widget as it would take to hack apart someone else’s HTML to suit my needs.

At first, I hunted down the question of whether I could make ArtistData join forces with GigPress, an existing WordPress plugin that handles calendaring for band sites and provides a bunch of widgets and shortcodes for band-specific purposes.

While I could get ArtistData to update GigPress’s database with new and changed dates, there was no way to do the reverse.  Since ArtistData doesn’t have an API to programmatically update show dates in their database, I was stuck with one-way replication.  If anyone made a change directly on the WordPress site, that change would never make it back to ArtistData and would never update the rest of the sites that carry our information.

I decided that I would just roll my own WordPress plugin.  We will manage event stuff only at ArtistData, not in two places.

I looked at the features the GigPress provides and modeled my plugin around providing those same features.  So far, I have implemented shortcodes, sidebar widget, and template tags.  I have inly implemented a handful of the 15 or 16 variables that GigPress offers with their shortcodes, but they’re enough for my personal needs at the moment.  I haven’t done the bits around custom CSS and custom HTML, but I think that should be fairly quick work when I sit down at this again.

As part of this plugin, I spent a lot of time investigating proper ways of writing a wordpress plugin.  There are a lot of really bad examples out there, but I took my initial cues from Jay Fortner’s site.  I’d like to believe that the plugin that I wrote is a reasonably clean and intelligently laid-out plugin.  It sure beats a lot of the dross I’ve encountered in other plugins.

You can see the work in progress on this plugin in a couple different places:

• http://www.frobeck.com/shows/
• http://www.justinancheta.com/shows/
• http://www.powers-that-be.com/shows/
  

All of them need some work on the front-end details.  I got to a certain point with my redesigns of all these sites and then got distracted by other projects.  I’ll probably return to these to finish up the details in another couple weeks.

The main question is what to do about offering the plugin to others.  I’ve spoken to the developers at Artistdata and they expressed interest in the plugin.  We have yet to sit down and discuss the options there, though.  I could alternatively offer the plugin as a purchased WordPress plugin, or just offer it up for free.  I’m somewhat interested in selling the plugin for downloads, if only because I’d have a reason to figure out the infrastructure to do all that.

For the moment, I’m going to see if there is any more interest on this conversation or this suggestion or this suggestion to see if interest in this plugin is sufficient for me to continue doing the work to release the plugin to the world somehow.