COD: Effectively Powering Conferences with Drupal

Many people in the Drupal community have some familiarity with COD, the Conference Organizing Distribution, due to its long history in powering regional Drupal event sites. Development of COD has recently seen a resurgence in resources and has expanded the power and usefulness of COD beyond the Drupal community.

In this case study, we’ll feature LinuxFest Northwest, the premier Linux event for the Pacific Northwest United States and Western Canada which draws over 1500 attendees every April. We’ll cover many of LinuxFest’s requirements including session submission, scheduling, ticketing/registration, and sponsorships; and how COD has effectively addressed those needs. Then we’ll focus on some key areas where Drupal’s flexibility has allowed LinuxFest to scale efficiently to handle its growing number of attendees, including a registration check-in system, badge label and barcode printing, digital signage, and RESTFUL endpoints for 3rd party mobile applications.

We’ll conclude by highlighting some of the recent COD developments and how COD can be used to help any organization with event management needs.

About the Presenters:
Jakob Perry and Emilie Nouveau are organizers at LinuxFest Northwest, and contribute to COD. Jason Yee is also a contributor to COD and created the Ticketing system.

Transcript

1. Effective Conference Sites with Drupal COD Case Study: LinuxFest Northwest
2. Who are we? Jakob Perry @japerry 7.x COD Maintainer ! Emilie Nouveau @DyanneNova Theming & Scheduling ! Jason Yee @gitbisect Ticketing & Registration
3. What is LinuxFest Northwest? Annual Conference on Everything Open Source
4. About the Fest • Annual Event • 1500 Attendees • Free to attend • 40+ Exhibitors • 80+ Sessions over two days • Volunteer run
5. LinuxFest Northwest Needs • Registration online and on-site • Pre-scheduled curated sessions • On-site Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions • Schedule for mobile, desktop, e-signs • Sponsor sign-up and display
6. LinuxFest Northwest Needs • Web Services for 3rd party apps • Sessions unpublished by default • Personalized Schedule • Two-month Call for Papers window • Assign multiple speakers to a session
7. Why COD? Feature-Rich, Community Driven
8. Ticket • Ticket works like Eventbrite • Multiple ticket types per entity (event) • Ticket types support different prices, availability and registration information collected. • Drupal Commerce integration • Reporting in views and easily customizable
9. Ticket
10. Ticket
11. Ticket
12. Ticket
13. Ticket
14. Ticket & Commerce Issues • Registration went missing if someone cancelled the process half-way through - FIXED! • Improve Ticket and Commerce integration and user feedback
15. Session Submission Customizable Content type • Default with Slides, Hero image • Multiple speakers • Flag speaker confirmation
16. Session Submissions Workflow for session acceptance • Curated: Fivestar for internal staff votes • Community Voting: Flags for public voting
18. Scheduling Needs • Ability to schedule a session across multiple rooms and multiple times • Ability to constrain when and where schedule items occur • Provide an intuitive UI for admins to create a schedule • Display the schedule in multiple formats
19. Schedule Concepts • Rooms and Times are created separately • Timeslots associate Rooms and Times
20. Schedule Display • Responsive schedule • Tabs for each day • “Add to my schedule”
21. Scheduling Issues • Permissions and access problems - FIXED! • Improve user interface - Drag and drop is coming!
22. Birds of a Feather • Session organizers setup a BoF schedule template • Works just like sessions • Registered attendees can schedule
24. Sponsors • Sponsors apply and get walked through the application process by an organizer • Sponsorship Levels are taxonomy terms • Commerce allows sponsors to buy sponsorships • Sponsor information is used throughout site
25. On-site Check-In • Fast check-in • Integrates with ticket module • Provides a view of users with search • Check-in captures time and allows changes to badge • Optional PDF printing of badge labels
26. RESTful Volunteer offered to create android application • JSON Feeds • Main Schedule • My Schedule • Sessions • Barcode Scanning
27. COD Timelines • Address critical issues in the queue • Improve administrative user experience • Completion of drag and drop scheduling • Permissions and security review • Aiming for a full release next year
28. Credits mordonez genjohnson fullerja christefano chrisguindon mortona2k mrconnerton cravecode irinaz timplunkett dead_arm andreathegiant Acquia MongoDB Stanford Univ. and other drupalers like you!
29. Ways to Contribute Come to the COD BoF tomorrow: 10:45am in G110 - Actency ! Join the COD sprint this Friday ! Contribute directly at d.o/project/cod_support
30. LinuxFest Northwest Call for Papers: November 2014 ! Sponsorships: Available now ! Registration: January 2015 April 25 - 26, 2015 Bellingham, Washington, USA
31. Thank You! Evaluate our Session: tiny.cc/cod-amsterdam2014