How can I create public display of all Activities for Current Day + X weeks in Future (WordPress)?

Question

We use 4.6.14 on WordPress. We're a radio station and we book guests for appearing on-air. Each guest is managed as a Contact and their appearances are recorded as a defined Activity (e.g., On-Air Appearance). We track each guest's appearance history by looking at Activities associated with his contact information. We also run reports for all on-air appearances (regardless of Contact) so we know ourselves what is on the schedule and what holes we have to fill.

We can do all of the above via CiviCRM internally (hooray)!

How can we dynamically display the "All appearances" view on our public site so that listeners get a list of upcoming guests? CiviEvents has RSS, HTML and iCal feeds that yields something close to what we want, but our appearances seem to be more like Activities than Events -- unfortunately Activities have no built in feeds. Also, my research shows that there may be such views in Drupal-based CiviCRM, but we're heavily in WordPress as a standard.

Can we write code to poll the Activity data to return what we want? Is there another approach? Or is this even possible?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You're looking at writing a custom WordPress plugin along the lines of the CiviEvent Widget plugin. Basically, you'll query the CiviCRM API to get activities (filtered appropriately to your needs) and then render them as a shortcode and/or widget.

So, yes, you can write custom code to do this, even as there is no built-in display for CiviCRM activities.