This is cool… starting today with WordCamps Buffalo and Albuquerque a plugin called “Taggregator” is being tested (here’s the update on the Community WordPress page). Currently it appears on the homepages of the two WordCamp sites. Nice to see more features added to conference sites like this.
It might be just when i happened to look at these, but it appears “Taggregator” only pulls in Tweets (WPArmchair pulls in photo and video instagrams, tweets w/ media, vines, flickrs, etc.). I’m sure this is an early version, and like many things will get further enhanced and polished down the road. I’ve always thought that conference sites – including WordCamp sites – should be more functional during and after the conference, and i’m glad to see projects like “Taggregator” move in that direction. Again, great to see this.
The “aggregator” concept has been around for years. But I’m happy to say WPArmchair played a part in inspiring this – apparently the positive reaction to WPArmchair’s sites in the past few camps (including San Fran) was the catalyst (at least from what I was told). I am told an official blog post announcing this is on it’s way, probably after initial testing of the new plugin is complete.
So what’s up with WPArmchair then? Of course, any organizer is welcome to their own WPArmchair site (a few non-WordCamp organizers have approached me already). But it was always planned to be a small side project which would be the initial step of a larger project… something that might see the light of day early next year (maybe around the next WordCamp Miami?). I’m planning on putting the current themes and plugins of WPArmchair on Github in the coming weeks once i do some code clean-up.
Also, if you like to read about WordCamp organization and the work that goes behind the scenes, you can check out my article on Torque Magazine that was published earlier this week.