Untappd Events Plugin for WordPress
If you own a bar with more than 4 beers on tap you’ve probably heard of Untappd, if not I’ll give you a little info.
Untappd is essentially a beer tracker for people looking for certain beers at bars in the area. The consumer opens the Untappd app on their phone, the phone then geo locates bars in the area and the beers that they have on tap. If you’re a beer nerd looking for Pliny the Elder this is essentially the ONLY way to find it in real-time.
So, for bars you can clearly see the benefit. Put a bunch of rare craft beers on tap and watch the hoards roll in. Untappd offers the bars a website dashboard where they can enter the beers on tap which will not only be posted to Untappd but will also be updated on the bar’s personal website, pretty cool right! What bar owner or manager wants to login to their website AND Untappd to update their beer list, especially when that list is changing 3 times a day!
Now we know that Untappd makes updating beers on your website super simple, but they also have an events section that owners can upload upcoming events to. This isn’t just beer events (although that’s what initially Untappd intended) you can also add other events such as DJ night, quizzo, comedy night, karaoke, etc.. The only issue with the events section of Untappd is that it’s very secondary to the beer list. When you embed Untappd into your bar website the events do show up but very small on a side tab, see below;
See how they kind of hide it on you, all the way on the right past the menus. This makes sense since they’re trying to sell beer, but I thought to myself there has to be a way to make uploading events just as easy on the bar owner as updating the beer list. So I emailed Untappd and asked if they had a similar widget or plugin that we could embed on this customer’s website that would ONLY bring in their upcoming events. Untappd replied and said that this doesn’t currently exist however they do have an open API that would allow me to build one myself if I felt so inclined.
After a few days with my awesome developers we came up with a shortcode enabled widget that would only pull in a bar’s events. Now the bar owner only needs to login to Untappd to update their beer list AND their upcoming events. It’s all in one place, easy peasy! If you or someone you know is using Untappd for their bar (which they should be because it’s a great driver of new business) have them hit us up to install the Events page plugin. Here’s what it looks like for our client Teresa’s Cafe in Wayne PA.
