AMC Activities Shortcode WordPress Plugin

AMC Activities Shortcode is a WordPress plugin to display selected trips/activities from the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) Activities Database on your own website.

Plugin No Longer Functions

In March of 2025 the AMC migrated from their home-grown Activities Database (ACTDB) to a new SalesForce-based app, the Outdoor Connector (OC).

This plugin relied on an API in ACTDB to allow users to pull public information from the database using XML queries. The OC does not, at this writing, publish an API for use on Chapter or Committee websites.

Until such time as the AMC enables API access to the OC, this plugin will be collecting dust. The plugin itself will cause errors in site rendering as the XML feed to ACTDB is no longer available. If API access to the OC is enabled, it is my intent to update this plugin to use the new API backend.

If you liked the functionality in this plugin, you should lobby your local Chapter to push API access to the OC.

Thanks for your support

Marty Jensen March 2025

Description

The AMC provides a simple API for the use of its member chapters that returns a list of upcoming activities. A user can ask for events using specific chapter, committee and/or activity codes. For example, a user might request events from the Boston Chapter + Hiking Committee or the Boston Chapter + Hiking Activities.

This plugin implements a WordPress shortcode that queries the API and displays the results on a page or a post as a list of upcoming events.

Features

The plugin implements a WordPress shortcode that can be used in any page, post or section that supports shortcodes. The shortcode format is

[amc_activities chapter=id committee=id activity=id limit=n]

The chapter ID is mandatory. All other attributes are optional, but it is recommended to use other parameters (committee, activity or limit) to restrict the list as [amc_activities chapter=xx] by itself will return all future chapter activities from the database.

The limit attribute controls how many events are displayed. The events are returned in chronological order so using limit=5 would restrict the display to the next 5 upcoming events.

Functionality to retrieve prior events is not available through the AMC's API and cannot be added through this plugin.

Additional documentation - including a list of valid codes - can be found on our Wiki page at https://github.com/graybirchsolutions/amc-activities-shortcode/wiki

Requirements

• PHP >= 7.1 (8.0 preferred)
• WordPress >= 5.2
• The option flag allow_url_fopen must be set to On in your site's PHP settings. (Not all hosting providers have this option turned on by default)

Installation

You can find the latest release of the plugin at https://github.com/graybirchsolutions/amc-activities-shortcode/releases/latest

1. Download the amc-activities-shortcode.zip file from the release page to your computer. (DO NOT try to install from the Source Code (zip) or the Source Code (tar.gz) links directly into WordPress)
2. Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to Plugins page and click 'Add New'
3. From the Add Plugins page, click the 'Upload Plugin' button at the top and select the zip file you downloaded in step 1.
4. When the plugin is installed, go to the Plugins page and activate the plugin

There is no admin or settings page. Basic usage instructions are provided in the plugin description on the Plugins page. Additional documentation can be found in the project Wiki at https://github.com/graybirchsolutions/amc-activities-shortcode/wiki.

Notes

For additional details - including a list of the Chapter, Committee and Activity codes - please see the project Wiki at https://github.com/graybirchsolutions/amc-activities-shortcode/wiki.

If you find a bug or are having difficulty getting the plugin working, please open an Issue (bug report) on the GitHub project page at https://github.com/graybirchsolutions/amc-activities-shortcode/issues. (You may need to be logged in to GitHub to add a bug report).

Affiliation

The author(s) of this plugin are not affiliated with nor endorsed by the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC).

The AMC maintains a read-only API to allow its committees and chapters to access public data on events posted to the AMC Activities Database at https://activities.outdoors.org.

This plugin has been written to allow committee and chapter websites that use WordPress as their website software to easily query the AMC's API and present upcoming event information on their website through the use of this software.

The AMC adds the following disclaimer to its API:

The Appalachian Mountain Club has developed this service for web display of chapter trips by AMC Chapters only and expressly disclaims the use of this service for any other purpose. AMC will not be responsible for manipulation or misuse of data available via this service.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Please see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html for details.

Contributors

• Martin Jensen (marty@graybirch.solutions)