Garmin Connect and WordPress
Do you want to show your Garmin Connect data on your WordPress site? A shortcode to include in your blog posts? You won’t find a WordPress plugin that can do that (anymore). Read on to find out why, and find out how you can get your Garmin Connect stuff on your site with another plugin.
I love my Garmin
I have been running for many years now and have been using my trusted Garmin Forerunner 405cx for almost five years already. It has helped me to register my training sessions, get a grip on my heart rate and even find my way back home. Back then, this watch was one of the most innovative wearables around. And quite frankly I still think it is great today.
I even love Garmin Connect
Garmin then created the Garmin Connect web platform where I could upload all my watch’s data and do basic graphical analyses of my runs online. And share the activities online by embedding on my WordPress site or sharing through social media. Maybe the best (hidden) feature was an RSS feed of all of my public activities that made it even easier to share. There were several WordPress plugins that used these basic sharing options to embed your Garmin activities in a widget or a post.
Around the end of 2014 the new modern, flat, user interface greatly improved the online looks of Garmin Connect. But somehow… it also killed something really important.
They killed the API by charging $5000
The new site, with its new look and feel also enabled several cool API features for developers. But unfortunately this was also the end of the free RSS feed and free API access. The Garmin Connect API site lists a $5000 One-time License Fee. A bit too steep for most open source developers.
The result? The WordPress plugins have ceased, the IFTTT recipe is dead and no one seems to be doing any new open source Garmin Connect development. New competitors (like Nike+ and TomTom) now also have their own watches, and old competitors (like Polar) now also have their online platform.
It seems that Garmin has lost every bit of its innovative head start to Nike, Strava, RunKeeper and Polar. Time to move on to something else? What if my trusted Garmin Forerunner will crash in the foreseeable future? Will I buy another Garmin again? Hardware yes, platform no.
Getting Garmin Connect on your WordPress site
But here’s a quick and dirty WordPress integration to Garmin Connect. I found the website of Sergey Krasnov which describes how you can have access to your public activities on Garmin Connect using JSON! Apparently your public data if freely available through the GC API. So I got the JSON Content Importer WordPress plugin and created this:
[jsoncontentimporter url="https://connect.garmin.com/proxy/activitylist-service/activities/baghuis?start=1&limit=1" numberofdisplayeditems="1" basenode="activityList"]<a href="https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/{activityId}" target="_blank" rel="noopener">{activityName} - {startTimeLocal}</a>[/jsoncontentimporter]As of April 2017, Garmin Connect requires the header “user-agent”to be set. For this you will need to purchase the Pro version of the JSON Content importer plugin (which I did not do, yet).
[jsoncontentimporter url=”https://connect.garmin.com/proxy/activitylist-service/activities/baghuis?start=1&limit=1″ numberofdisplayeditems=”1″ basenode=”activityList”]{activityName} – {startTimeLocal}[/jsoncontentimporter]
It is an automatically updating link to my latest training run. Sergev’s site gives plenty of leads on how to get other Garmin Connect data using JSON, so I guess someone should start cracking 🙂
For now, Garmin Connect is here to stay for me, but seriously needs to do better if my next watch will be a Garmin again.