GNOME Event Manager

Every year, when preparing websites for our conferences, we have to, more or less, reinvent our infrastructure from the scratch. This project aims to provide a default conference management system (+ website) suitable to the needs of our conferences.

Participants

SaumyaPathak, AndreasNilsson, FabianaSimoes

Relevant Art

• COD

  • Website is integrated with Conference Management System.

  • Integration with Ubercart for registration and checkout.

  • Paper review: Functionality for voting on sessions (Binary, no comments)
  • E-mails for accepted, rejected and confirmation of sessions
  • Publishes a schedule (You edit sessions and inform when they happen)
  • Allows for BoF scheduling

  • Free themes available at Drupal Themes.

  • Easy to install...

  • ... hard to set up.

  • Not so easy to create, edit or customize themes

  • Documentation: Good for Drupal, not so good for COD itself.

  • No support for organizing the schedule, just for publishing it.

  • See Known problems

• Drupal Conference

  • Not actively maintained

• OCS

  • Used for GUADEC 2009

  • Really terrible to theme

• Pentabarf

  • Based on Ruby.
  • Has content planning, schedule module etc.
  • Has a number of export options.
  • Feedback for the event option available.

  • Deprecated, frab is the new pentabarf

• Indico

  • Used for GUADEC 2012, along with a Drupal website
  • East to organize schedule: Drag-an-drop of sessions into slots.
  • Possible to customize Indico's theme by changing the default CSS.

  • No documentation (not for Users, not for Developers)

  • Hard to set up.

  • Overwhelming and confusing configuration controls.

  • Website is not integrated with Conference Management System.

• OSEM

  • Used for openSUSE Conference 2013
  • Easy to use interface.
  • Based on Ruby on Rails.
  • Automatic email sending for accepted/rejected papers
  • Paper review and registration support

  • No documentation whatsoever D:

  • Difficult to solve errors.

• Building on top of WordPress

  • Used for GUADEC 2013
  • Easy to install and set up

  • Easy to create/customize themes

  • Documentation: Great user and developer documentation

  • Website would be integrated with Conference Management System

  • Need to develop additional modules and functionalities.

  • Will probably make use of WP plugins to cover functionalities: ACF, Post Notes

Discussion

Goals and scope

See draft at GnomeWeb/EventsSite.

More requirements at GuadecPlanningHowTo/Software