Hello,
I need your help and wisdom.
I help a student group with their annual gaming convention. I have been "rolling my own" website for them for about 12 years via PHP, HTML, and MySQL. I am curious about replacing the site with COD.
My primary concerns are around the ways in which a gaming convention is different than a typical conference.
Gamemaster & Events
Gamemasters (GMs) need to be able to submit events. Those events will not be automatically accepted, however, we would like the GMs do do the work of submitting the data and having it ingested into the system so that the Gaming Coordinator merely has to worry about editing it, assigning it a room/table, and assigning GMs to run it. There needs to be a workflow via admin portals for the Gaming Coordinator to review, edit, and accept/deny such events.
Canceling Events
When events are withdrawn very late, e.g., after the program goes to print, we don't want to just delete them and boot everyone out of them. Rather, we want a way to mark them as Canceled, which, to us, means they show up in the listings, but attendees cannot sign up for them.
Genres vs. Tracks
To further complicate things, we need to categorize each event by the type of game it is (Board and Card, Miniatures, Tabletop Role-Playing Game, etc.). There are six genre, which, it seems to my naive perception, would be a good translation for "tracks" in COD.
Tables & Rooms
We assign on the order of 50-100 different tables scattered across about two dozen venues. Is that going to be feasible in terms of resource management as well as displaying that information in a coherent fashion?
Contact Forms
I see mention of contact forms in COD. Can I route them to roles instead of specific people?
Role-based Access and Permissions
I assume Drupal/COD provides the ability to assign access and permissions by role, e.g., Convention Director, Gaming Coordinator, etc. can all be given the capacity to edit different things and access different pages.
Printing Materials
One of the more complex and critical issues is printing of badges, sign up sheets (to run out to the game masters prior to their games), and a summary label for attendee packets that contains a brief listing of their events. We currently use a mixture of mail-merge-like approaches as well as direct printing.
T-shirts
We have T-shirts. We have two kinds each year, one style for Coordinators, one for everyone else. Can COD provide the capacity to track the proper t-shirt tally/order for such a scenario?
Commerce
We do not need a store or shopping basket. We are forced to let the University handle the transactions, so we keep them simple, and there are no plug-ins to their system. Basically, an e-mail from the University system is the proof of payment and the only message we receive. Is there any clever capability for automating receipt of such a message by COD to mark someone as "paid"?
Dealers
I can't imagine our Dealers are any more complicated than any regular expo. Am I being naive? Is there some sticking point I should be considering?
Self-Registration
From examples I have seen, it looks like we can set it up so a registrant can sign themselves up for events. Is that correct? Will COD check for schedule conflicts?
Workflow States
Is there formal workflow support in COD? E.G., review and approval workflows where we can set up approval gates?
Thank you for your attention to these topics.
Comments
Yes but...
it may involve a lot of customization.
I'm not a COD expert, but I use COD for a Science Conference and we run a d6 instance of COD that has some specific differences from the normal COD install. I'll try to respond with info as I can, but we may need to defer to the experts for more info:
RE: Gamemaster and Events - So this could be scheduled like BOFs (Bird of a Feather), but it almost seems like you should create an independent track of sessions and call them Game Events. Our build had multiple types of submissions for both spoken sessions and for poster sessions so I cloned the in place systems and modified them for posters. Worked pretty good. As far as workflow, that can be modified as well. It's a little trickier, but we were able to set it up to allow for submitted abstracts, reviewers, comments and then acceptance or rejection.
RE: Canceling Events - I would think this could be accomplished by creating a taxonomy of canceled events that could be styled to show up with some sort of special formatting to indicate it is canceled. Or maybe set up one more status flag of canceled instead of submitted or accepted. Again this may require a little tweaking but if you have solid PHP, it shouldn't be too hard (maybe the experts can chime in)
RE: Genres vs Tracks - I don't think this will be a big deal, just adding an additional taxonomy term that could be aggregated by views should work. Views is pretty powerful and you should be able create that extra layer of classification if needed.
RE: Tables and Rooms - I'm not sure about this one. We have used the room scheduling component and it works well, but this is really pushing the envelop and your view/display of the schedule would be crazy. You'd probably have to do something like a drill down schedule that looked at top level by venue, then by room to make it more manageable or perhaps just have some sort of accordian in place to help clean up the interface so that only the venue are looking at is expanded. This is definitely not out of the realm of possibility, but would be require some special sauce.
RE: Contact Forms - Shouldn't be a problem. Drupal is really flexible when working with workflows with roles and users.
RE: Role Based Access and Permissions - This may be the easiest of all your requirements, as Drupal gives great granular control of roles and users.
RE: Printing Materials - I'd have to defer to people who have done more print management for badges etc. but I would think you could create these displays using views with a little effort, but shouldn't be too heinous.
RE: T-shirts - Our organization hasn't actually sold t-shirts at our events, but I do know that COD has e-commerce tied into it with the ability to sell registrations and lots of camps sell shirts, but I don't know if they use COD for that or not. I would guess that would be possible but not sure how exactly. (Experts chime it please.)
RE: Dealers - This is something we haven't had to deal with since as a CA based organization we don't have dealers/exhibitors but the DrupalCon's do and they use COD for their sites. I would say that if this is similar to sponsors, you could be able to clone the Sponsor functionality and modify it to meet this need. Might not be perfect, but could work.
RE: Self Registration - COD does allow registrants to vote on events but this might be interesting to look into. I know there has been talk about having attendees "sign up" for sessions so session organizers can track the attendees and put the more popular sessions in bigger rooms, but I don't know if this is what you are talking about. Some events have created personal schedules to allow attendees to track their sessions, but I don't know that this is a prerolled feature or an add-on. I also don't know that it's set up to be able track schedule conflicts, the session tracking is usually based on a chronological time period so it would show if a user had signed up for multiple sessions in a time-slot, but it wouldn't specifically call it out. But that's not to say it couldn't be done, just outside my experience. Drupal can do some amazing things if you have the chops to dig into the code, but it can be really hard if you're just trying to modify using using the GUI and general administration interface.
RE: Workflow states: COD/Drupal is pretty good with workflow and approvals even if it's not up to snuff right out of the box, there are lots of compatible contrib ways to do workflow. I would guess you'd be good with the workflow out of the box, but you'd have to step into it to know otherwise.
SUMMARY - COD with some tweaking should be able to do almost all of what you want to do, but it will take some time and experimentation to get there. If you want to get this up in a month, not likely. If you're looking at 4+ months to work/tweak with it, it's very likely you'd be fine. One more caveat is that the official COD is D6. That's what we use and it's got more features baked in, but there's been some good work on COD for D7, ultimately I think that's going to be the best place to be, but it's not there quite yet, or at least not since I last tried to work with it about 6 months ago. So YMMV on this.
I'm assuming that you've looked at the COD website, if not that's a good place to start, but also tap into the IRC Channel. Reach out to some of the bigger camps to see what they've done. I'm really only familiar with Drupal Camp sites here in CA, others like Colorado, Atlanta, NY, Boston and London might be able to help. Might want want to contact the organizing committee for BAD Camp they did a lot of work on COD for BADCamp 2012. Also the Drupal Association helps build all the COD sites for the DrupalCons, and of course talk to the COD maintainers.
Maintainers for Conference Organizing Distribution
http://drupal.org/node/162354/committers
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Good Luck and feel free to contact me:
cod@dboeger.com
@dboeger