This page describes how to display meeting data from the WSZF server on your area or region website.

Each area and regional website in the WSZF can have its own meeting list, which will appear under the URL for that area or region but get its data from the root server. (BMLT calls this a “satellite.”) We recommend using crouton – the other satellites have not always kept up with the latest changes to accommodate virtual and hybrid meetings.

To use crouton with WordPress, install the crouton plugin and set the parameters. Then on your meeting list page, include a shortcode [bmlt_tabs]. The resulting table of meetings will be “responsive,” that is, adjust its format appropriately for a laptop or a smartphone. There are lots of options for parameters to the short code to show a map, use data from multiple service bodies, include a dropdown with a list of areas, and so forth. Two other useful shortcodes that you can use on the same page are [meeting_count] and [group_count].

Another WordPress crouton short code, [crouton_map], can be used to bring up a searchable map — this is likely to be more useful than the tabbed display for searching large numbers of meetings, for example from tomato, which aggregates meeting information from all registered BMLT servers worldwide. See map-based meeting search for a Seattle-based example of using [crouton_map] with tomato. There are lots of other options for crouton, but that’s the basics! See https://bmlt.app/crouton/ for additional information. Crouton’s settings interface, accessible from the WordPress Dashboard for your site, also includes documentation (which currently seems to be more complete).

If you have an area or regional website built using something other than WordPress, you can use croutonjs instead, which provides all the same functionality but on a static webpage. There are directions on GitHub at https://github.com/bmlt-enabled/crouton/tree/master/croutonjs, including a sample web page. Another option is to create a WordPress page on your site called meetings, and link to that from your home page.

We also provide a page on the zonal website that can be used to display meetings for any area in the WSZF BMLT data. Just link to this page from your area or other website. The URL should have this form: https://meetings.wszf.org/?service_body=5 (substitute the ID for the area you want to show for the 5). To find this ID, you can go to https://bmlt.wszf.org/main_server/semantic/, then pick “get service bodies” and click on the “response URL”. The ID will be the number in the first column corresponding to the area you want. You can also use this page to display meetings for multiple areas — for example, https://meetings.wszf.org/?service_body=3,10,22 shows the meetings for Everett Area, Seattle Area, and South King County Area (all in Washington State). Finally, you can also supply any other crouton shortcode parameter in the URL. For example, this version includes a map: https://meetings.wszf.org/?service_body=5&show_map=1.

Finally, if you have virtual meetings, consider people who don’t have computers and internet service — can they call in from a landline? What Seattle Area did for example is put a note before the crouton schedule giving general directions for joining a zoom meeting from a landline, since the number is the same for all the zoom meetings. (See https://seattlena.org/meetings.) They also didn’t use the one-tap format for phone numbers (for example +16699009128,,448760192) — this is of course handy for people with smart phones, but the smart phone people aren’t the ones to be most concerned about here. Instead, focus more on people who aren’t tech savvy who need to call in from a landline.