[OSGeo-Conf] Conference software

[Barry Rowlingson]

[I've now subscribed to Conference-dev so apologies if you got this already]

On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 10:32 AM, b.j.kobben at utwente.nl
<b.j.kobben at utwente.nl> wrote:

> For the FOSS4g2013 conference we used two separate systems: WordPress for
> the main conference site and the presentation and workshops tracks, and
> OJS (Open Journal System) [http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/] for the Academic Track
> (AT).

 Actually we used three or more separate systems!

 OJS for the Academic track submissions and refereeing (these were
peer-reviewed by a selected panel, so needed the OJS workflow).

 WordPress for the main 'pages' (because this is what Barry K was
familiar with, and he kickstarted the web pages)

 The RegOnline service for conference registration and payment
(because that's what our AGI staff use)

 Django for database-driven stuff - the presentation timetable,
presenters, locations etc all in a system based partly on the code
developed for pyconde (because I love Django).

 If we'd started with Django/pyconde then we would not have needed
WordPress since it includes Django CMS which can build a tree of
templated pages in the same way as WordPress.

 The pyconde code and my fork are on github. My fork also includes the
pledge pages, the map gallery code and the custom stuff I did for the
timetable.

> The OJS we used for the AT is installed on
> the OSGEO servers, and also used by the OSGEO Journal.

 No its not! We didn't use any OSGeo servers at all - *everything*
(WP, MySQL, Django, OJS) ran on a *single* Amazon instance (I think it
was a "medium" instance, the "small" one kept killing MySQL).

>>> We found out that the german linux day, Linuxtag [3], is facing the
>>> similar problems. Our recent plans are, to enhance Frab [4] to fit our
>>> needs during the next years.

 I really only looked at Python-based solutions since that's my
skillset, so I can't comment on the suitability of Ruby or PHP based
solutions.

 If you want the problem taken off your hands, then I suggest you get
the Eldarion guys to set up a Symposion-based solution for you. Its an
open-source (python/django) system that they can host for you and will
do custom work for a price. Or you can run Symposion yourself and fix
it up as you want, or pay Eldarion (or anyone else) to do custom
stuff.

 If we'd not already had to use RegOnline for registrations/payment
and WP for the web pages I would have urged the committee to throw
some money at Eldarion.

 I'm happy to share Google Analytics if anyone wants to know what the
server load was.