COD Overview

What is COD?

COD stands for Conference Organizing Distribution and is a fully packaged Drupal distribution, used to facilitate coordination of and participation in conferences via the conference website. COD can improve the efficiency of setting up a powerful website for most conferences and events, and provide value to attendees, organizers, non-developers and developers.

Usecod.com is a public-facing site created to explain COD in plain English and encourage more adoption. Also listed are Showcases that feature sites using COD.

The COD roadmap is at http://usecod.com/roadmap and documentation is at http://drupal.org/documentation/build/cod.

History

COD existed as a group of modules for Drupal 5 and the Drupal 6 version is a rewrite with similar goals.

While COD draws on patterns used by other Drupal event websites, DrupalCamp Colorado 2010 was the first event to specifically use the Drupal 6 version of COD, and volunteers from that event contributed a great deal back to the project, specifically to the COD Support project which has been the main development focus thus far.

Goals

The short term development goals for COD include developing a proper fully packaged Drupal distribution for COD that includes the COD_Support and other required modules for the project in order to facilitate easier installation and collaboration in the issue queue, so that we can improve COD as a community.

Right now, COD has several useful features, and is somewhat easy to use for site builders and developers who are familiar with Drupal. The overall goal for COD is to make it very easy for non-developers to build a fully-featured event management website. Therefore, the immediate direction for COD is to get a full Drupal 6 release out, then move onto Drupal 7, where we can really focus on making COD rock.

The COD roadmap explains our development goals.

How can I get involved?

• Using COD and providing feedback, contributed themes or other features
• Work on COD Documentation. Documenting the setup and configuration would be extremely valuable to helping folks who are new to COD.
• Identifying a feature below and opening an issue in the queue of cod_support or a dependency module to discuss how the feature should be implemented, and ideally provide a patch.
• Comment on COD feature requests to help us gauge interest

COD Features

The chart below lists features that COD currently provides , the level of configuration required to use those features, and the level of documentation available for each feature. These features are organized by general user role on the site (not necessarily a Drupal user role in the technical sense). For each role, a "user dashboard" is suggested, with the goal of making it easy for users to access information and perform tasks relevant to them. For the most up-to-date status of COD, see the COD_Support project page .

Key modules used in COD are the Signup module for managing lists of attendees, Ubercart for accepting payment for registration, and the UC_Signup module for simplifying the process of registering for an account on the site, entering attendee profile information, and paying registration fees.

ND = Needs documentation. Most of COD ND, though having a COD-specific document that points users to the documentation for the underlying modules will be appropriate in many cases.

Below this chart is a list of miscellaneous tasks and their related Drupal.org issues, where applicable.

Key COD features, based on user role

Attendee

* Potential dashboard:
      o official announcements
      o sessions, forum posts with tags I subscribe to
* As the event draws closer easily change homepage from sessions to announcements and include BOFs, Food, maps front and center

Checkin Administrator

Session Organizer

* Potential Dashboard:
      o sessions proposed
      o most popular sessions by comments
      o most popular sessions by votes
      o recent session review submissions

Event Sponsor

Sponsor Admin

Attendee relations/Event organizer

      o profile fields
      o order status
      o previous event attendance and current event status