Yeah, I did hear from someone at the C4L journal and I doubt WP will
be an option for what we want.

Open conference systems is definitely an option, though, but I have
not really looked at it much just yet.

Drupal is probably going to be the most work to set up, but of course,
it provides a lot of flexibility.

We'll just have to dig around a bit more and see what happens.

Thanks for everyone's help, though.
-Jon



On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 1:02 PM, Ross Singer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Jon,
>
> The conference and the journal are run fairly differently (did anybody
> from the journal get back to you?).  The journal's actually organized
> (from what I can tell).  It uses WordPress
>
> The conference, on the other hand, uses a crazy mish-mash of things
> that changes from year to year.  CfPs are handled by email (which I
> would really like to see changed this year, since invariably one or
> two gets lost and they're formatted all crazily differently).  These
> are then put into a custom voting "machine" (the first year it was a
> Backpack page and a bookmarklet, last year a standalone RoR
> application) and the voting is open for a period of time.  We haven't,
> to date, used the Drupal voting module (although it comes up every
> year) because nobody has gotten it to work satisfactorily for
> presentations.
>
> The voting applications, I might add, haven't been without their share
> of criticism.
>
> At some point, I think a dedicated 'conference application' is
> necessary for Code4lib, something that can take submissions, vote on
> them, build the conference schedule and host the videos, as well as
> deal with delegates and whatnot.  Last year's voting booth (nicknamed
> ConferenceKeeper) was designed to do this sort of work, but it really
> needs some sort of official blessing or alternative.
>
> Speaking of alternatives, have you looked at Open Conference System:
> http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ocs
> ?
>
> Good luck,
> -Ross.
>
> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 11:58 AM, Jonathan Blackburn <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> John,
>>
>> This is really good to know - thanks for the info!
>>
>> The committee I am on needs to make a decision pronto so I don't think
>> we can wait, but I would be interested in taking a look regardless as
>> you near completion.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Jon
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 12:40 PM, John Fereira <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> Jonathan Blackburn wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Don't mean to clutter up the list, but I am on a team that is
>>>> considering using Drupal for a conference collaboration site
>>>> (including submitting/voting on topics, user profiles, etc.) and
>>>> wanted to see what Code4Lib was using both for its journal
>>>> submissions/moderation AS WELL AS topic voting.
>>>>
>>>> If the person managing either of these systems can shoot me an e-mail,
>>>> that would be great!
>>>>
>>>> (Or, if anyone else has created a conference site using Drupal, that
>>>> would be wonderful, as well.)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> I haven't seen a Conference management site developed using drupal but for
>>> the past few years I've maintained the conference web site for JA-SIG.  It
>>> was written many years ago at another university and I volunteered to take
>>> over the maintenance of the code (I didn't know what I was getting into at
>>> the time).  While it's mostly functional it is extremely poorly written
>>> (some of the ugliest java code I've seen) so when it *doesn't* function as
>>> desired it's difficult to figure out what's going on.
>>> A couple of months ago I began work on a complete redesign of the system,
>>> basically as a g-job.  Since my programming skills are strongest in a java
>>> environment the new system is being developed in java, using the Spring
>>> Framework (I've developed several other sites/applications using Spring).
>>>  It's being built on top of the Apache Jackrabbit content repository
>>> (JSR-170) to manage most of the site content.  While it's primarily intended
>>> to be used to manage future JA-SIG conferences I'm building it such that
>>> it's flexible and can use templates for creating Conference web sites for
>>> any other organization as well.  It's all being developed using open source
>>> software and I hope to make it available as an open source application.
>>>
>>
>