I’ve slowly started catching up on my backlog thanks to finally being fully free from my Civil internship. Currently I’m working on getting registration working properly in both the back end and front end —

Initially I had planned storing registration data as post meta data for the events that users were registering for — with custom fields for registration stored as serialized information in the database with the key being something along the lines of userid. However, I recently realized that it would be much better — in terms of getting access to the admin UI easily and also for really being able to extend registrations — if I made registrations another custom post type.

I’ve been working on that since then — at the moment I’ve got the post type registered, etc. but for moderation I decided to go with my own custom statuses for the post (thanks to a conversation with jjj) — using register_post_status — as publish, draft, etc. don’t make too much sense for registrations; rather I needed some statuses that I could use to moderate the data. This bit has taken me a fair amount of time — in parts due to a slight lack of documentation, as well as some difficulty I had in getting my custom status to display properly in the admin UI — a lot of digging through the code has allowed me to solve that probem atleast. I should be over with registration quickly now — for both WP and BP without any major hurdles.

After that — most probably I should be able to reach back on schedule within this week — I might get in an extra status update on this blog this week.

Status Update

Hi

This week went by setting up the WordPress UI, playing around with BuddyPress and setting it up. A screenshot of the backend, as it stands now:

Event Admin

I wanted to avoid adding loads of tiny boxes on the side column — or too many extra wide, but essentially empty metaboxes in the main area. Hence grouping everything into a ‘super’-metabox and allowing non-essential stuff to be disabled. Something I still have to work on is the User registration form, and allowing complete customization from the admin backend (that’s the project for the second half of this week).

The date/time popup is the Anytime plugin for jquery.

Currently I’m working on making a function that allows registering custom posts as components in BuddyPress — something that can be essentially summed up as taking bits and pieces of custom posts, wrapping them properly in functions and registering BuddyPress actions from the example component and voila — we have Custom Post Components! This bit of code is being kept separate from the rest of the plugin so that I can put it up somewhere separately for others to use (if anyone is interested).

That’s about it for this weeks status update — essentially, I should get a bare bones events plugin ready by this weekend, and then it’s time to add all the extra functionality!

Hi!

I’m Kunal Bhalla — I’ve just completed my third year as a Civil Engineering BTech. at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi — currently in Mumbai, India (UTC+5.30). Possibly useful links: the blog for EventPress (the GSoC project), the GSoC Proposal and my personal blog.

The idea for an events plugin for WordPress came about from my working on many event-related websites for college (festivals, etc.): I wanted to be able to create a site around an event easily and quickly and then just skin it for each event as required. With a bit of work and loads of feedback, this idea became my GSoC proposal:

An events plugin for WordPress and BuddyPress. Event functionality will be built around the new Custom Post type — for BuddyPress sites, the events will be completely integrated with the Social layer provided (activity streams, groups, forums, etc.).

I’ll be posting I’ve posted a revised scope as a page on this blog soon.