Wordpress plugin for MeetYourNextMP.com

Meet Your Next MP is a crowd-sourced list of events around the UK for the general election. We encourage others to take and reuse this data.

If you run a blog using the WordPress platform, perhaps one about your town or region, it is straight forward to add a list of election events in your local area. This helps to inform your visitors and gives them opportunities to meet their possible next MP!

You need a WordPress blog you can add extensions to. If you don’t, see the bottom of this post for other options.

Firstly, grab and install the OpenACalendar extension.

When this is set up, go to “Settings” and “OpenACalendar” and look under “New Event Pool and source of events”.

Set a title of anything you want, like “election events”. The title is just a reminder for you.

Set a source URL of “meetyournextmp.com”.

You can leave the filter blank to get all events, but if your blog is about one part of the country only you’ll probably want to only get events from your local area.

To do this, first go to MeetYourNextMP.com and look up your local area - like this one, for Edinburgh South West.

Sometimes there are several seats in the same place; in this case you may be able to jump to another page that includes all of them. For instance if you look at the page for Edinburgh South West you’ll see there is an option to instead see a page for all events in Edinburgh, which has 5 different seats.

Once you have the page you want, look up the number in the URL - so for instance in http://meetyournextmp.com/area/690-edinburgh the number you want is 690.

Choose to filter by area and type this number in.

Now press “create” followed by “get events from this source now”. Done!

There will be a widget you can place in the side bar of your blog - this can be configured in the “Appearance” then “widgets” section.

If you go to “Settings” and “OpenACalendar” then you can press a button to get a short code that you can use in posts and pages.

If you have a WordPress install where you can’t install plugins there may be other ways to do this with JavaScript. If you have a non-Wordpress site there may be Javascript options to - get in touch on our email list and we’ll try and help.