Thanks to everyone sprinting this week, we put over 250 combined hours on getting COD into a stable state and released our first beta at Drupalcon Austin!
Major new features from the alphas (Before Jan):
Transitioned from Entity Registration to Ticket module
Having a proper registration system that meets the needs of camps, cons, and non-drupal events has been a source of pain and work-arounds in the 7.x version of COD (and registration in general). The ticket module changes much of this by re-architecting to a data model similar to eventbrite.
Learn howto create registrations here: https://drupal.org/node/2281411
Learn howto add commerce here: https://drupal.org/node/2281399
New base theme (Pisces) built on Omega 4)
Thanks to Dyannenova for building a new simple, but beautiful theme for COD. Built on Omega4, it will include some templates to make your site work from the start.
Conference management tied to the event content type
Beta has more strongly tied all configuration and management of content types to each event. This will help make it easier to see what sessions your event are hosting, sponsors for each event, etc. The only thing that is global are Sponsorship Levels.
Introduced new Room and Time entities, timeslot field collection tied to events
Previous versions had a whacky way of pushing timeslots to room nodes, which was confusing and not scalable. In beta (and alpha7+), the schedule system is all tied to and event, making it easier to make new rooms and times and schedule sessions, timeslots, and bofs.
Full BoF support
Birds of a Feather (BoFs) are now fully supported in their own schedule and can be created by end users. Once you make up your schedule template, 'create a bof' will automatically show up under the bof tab for your event.
New scheduler, Drag-n-drop coming!
The session scheduler has been redesigned to be much more user friendly, and after a long friday sprint at DC Austin, a preliminary drag-n-drop scheduler was made! We're hoping to get these changes into Beta 2 or 3 soon. Everyone using beta1 now will be able to drop in these new changes with nothing more than running updb and clear cache.
Stable data model
With the release of BETA 1, the maintainers of COD pledge to keep the data model static for 1.x, and if there are any minor changes needed, there will be a clear upgrade path. For all other configuration options, feature changes, etc, users can be assured any patches that are committed are associated with an upgrade path.
When do we see a full release? How close is COD to 'done'?
The main reason we haven't made a full release is due to security concerns. We're hoping with BETA that more camps will use the distro and report back bugs and we can get them fixed. While efforts were done to mitigate any potential security issues (views permissions, menu callbacks, etc), we know there is still work to be done here. By being beta, we can keep these issues out in the open and be transparent to camps that they need to do security audits before releasing their sit to the public.
Once the critical bugs are resolved and camps feel that security concerns have been squashed, a RC will be released.
Can we use COD now?
In short? Yes! If you've been battling COD Alphas (which have been horrendous and not for production unless you're very brave), be happy to know the BETA is much closer to prime-time use. We encourage camps to use and improve the beta, report back issues in the queue and we'll make attempts to get patches in asap.
How can I help?
Test COD today: http://www.drupal.org/project/cod
Report back COD issues here:
* Features: http://drupal.org/project/issues/cod_support
* Theme: http://drupal.org/project/issues/cod (tag under Pisces Theme)
* Profile changes: http://drupal.org/project/issues/cod
* Documentation: https://drupal.org/node/1837770
Let us know you're using COD by tweeting to @usecod on Twitter or post a comment here.