Online Meeting Support
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We need better support for online meetings.
Add online meeting type so people can search for online meetings.
Don’t require a street address. Meaningless for online meetings.
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In addition to the good work @wokat has provided as a workaround, we’re having some discussions about a companion plugin specifically for online meetings.
If you are a developer and would like to help with this effort, please let me know and I’ll send you an invite to join our Slack channel.
I think our Intergroup is going to try supporting online meetings using the existing TSML plugin. In the meeting details, there are inputs for two web URLs and contact phone. You can put the join link for your WebEx or Zoom or whatever in one of the URLs, and you can put the full number with meeting code as the contact phone like +19995551212,,12345678#. These show up in the web interface and the app as hyperlinks. I’m also adding a new meeting type “VO” for Virtual/Online which I will support with a local code change. This will just show as “VO” in the app for now, but I’m thinking of asking GSO if they will consider supporting it.
What does everyone think?
We’ve managed to shoe-horn virtual meetings into our listings using the latest version of the plugin (v3.2.1). Here’s what we’re doing:
1. Make a child theme and override functions.php to add a new “Virtual Meeting” type. We also decided to add the type to items shown in the listing page (This shows “Virtual Meeting” and “Temporary Closure” in addition to Open and Closed to the right of the “Meeting” column on the meeting listing/search page).
if (function_exists('tsml_custom_types')) { tsml_custom_types(array( 'VM' => 'Virtual Meeting' )); } if (function_exists('tsml_custom_flags')) { tsml_custom_flags(array('O', 'C', 'TC', 'VM')); }Then, for each meeting we did the following…
2. Under “Meeting Information”, we ticked “Virtual Meeting” and set the Notes to: “THIS IS A VIRTUAL MEETING.
To join this meeting from the Meeting Guide app, tap ‘View Web Page’, then tap the appropriate link to join with Zoom or by Phone. Alternatively, you can dial in manually: +1-999-555-1212, Meeting ID: 123 456 789.”
3. Under “Location Information”, we set Location to “Virtual Meeting”, entered the address of our local Central Office, and set Notes to “THIS IS A VIRTUAL MEETING. We do not have a physical location. The address given is for the Atlanta Central Office, but only because it is required.” This one “location” can be repeated for each meeting.
4. Under “Contact Information” we set Website to the (in our case) Zoom join URL, and Phone to the full phone number, including the meeting ID (ex: +19995551212,,123456789#).
Both the Website and Phone turn into links that are clickable in the plugin, and when someone taps “View Web Page” in the app, it takes them to that same plugin page. Someone can click the Zoom link and Zoom will load up in a browser, in a browser plugin, or the app, and someone can click on the Phone link and their phone will automatically dial the number, and after connecting, dial the meeting ID.
Here is an example listing:
https://atlantaaa.org/meetings/quarantined-and-sober-mon-am/Not entirely ideal/user-friendly, but this is probably about as good as it can get without some involved code changes to the plugin and the app.
By the way, we did ask GSO to consider adding support for a “Virtual Meeting” type as well as adding meeting join links and whatnot, to which they responded: “Thank you for your suggestion. We’ve added it to our project backlog and will be considering it along with other feature suggestions for inclusion in a future release.”
In other words, it sounds like they’re not planning to support virtual meetings in the Meeting Guide app any time soon.
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