Advanced Conference Discussion - what kind of plugin?

[claywhipkey]

Hello,

I am hoping to add some additional ways to aggregate discussion of the conference as well as presentations. This would be along the lines of including a Twitter feed based on a specific #hashtag, importing blog posts with a specific category/tag, and perhaps even showing Flickr photos based on a specific tag.

My question is what type of plugin would be the right place to put that? It would seem to be narrowed down to either "blocks" or "generic", although I don't actually know what either of those really mean. I want to develop it as a plugin so it could be contributed to the community as well as not messing up the core application.

Thanks for any input.

[jmacgreg]

Hi claywhipkey,

If it's a sidebar-type block, I'd recommend going the block plugin route; if you want the info to appear elsewhere, of course, it'd have to be a generic plugin. A couple of general notes:

* If it's just a matter of displaying an HTML/Javascript code snippet, you may want to look at Juan's Custom Block Manager plugin: viewtopic.php?f=28&t=3459. You should be able to download and install that plugin; create a custom block; and add your code to the block contents. I haven't used it myself yet, but give it a shot.

* Matt just wrote a block plugin howto: http://pkp.sfu.ca/wiki/index.php/Writing_a_Block_Plugin. This should give you a much better idea on what block plugins do; how they work; and how to put your own together.

* Regardless of which way you go about implementing this, we'd love to see the results! Please let us know how it goes.

Cheers,
James