Is COD right for my project?

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timgoddard's picture
Posted by timgoddard on November 10, 2011 at 12:29am

I'm preparing to manage a project for a conference site, and I was hoping that COD would fit the bill. Looking at it, though, I don't think it will do what I need. However, before giving up on it entirely, I thought I would check with folks here to be sure one way or the other.

Here are the problems I foresee--please let me know if any of these are doable with COD:

  1. This site would be for multiple conferences in multiple locations, ongoing. The COD sites I've seen featured are all one-shot deals focusing on a single conference.
  2. On a similar note, sessions really need to be linked to their specific conference, and it sounds like this doesn't really happen in COD.
  3. On that same note again, COD does not appear to be well set up to present or feature past conference materials--videos, transcripts, etc.
  4. I do not want Presenters to be linked with Users, but to be their own content type.
  5. Last, and this is somewhat minor, I do not want minor events (breaks, lunch, etc.) to have to be linked from schedules and such to their own, blank, page.

I'd be happy to be told I'm wrong on any of these. Thanks in advance.

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Comments

Your needs are fairly

Posted by c4rl on November 10, 2011 at 12:52pm
c4rl's picture

Your needs are fairly specific and while COD can certainly be extended with your own custom code to have these features, they are not provided out-of-the-box afaik.

COD is generally designed around the common use-cases for Drupalcamps with community-submitted sessions, community voting, news and scheduling.

Consider adding some of these as separate feature requests to the COD Support issue queue http://drupal.org/project/cod_support

Short answers:

  1. Yes, though multisite may help you?
  2. It's usually one conference instance per site.
  3. You can do this via CCK filefield or emfield on session nodes.
  4. Consider using Content Profile as a potential workaround http://drupal.org/project/content_profile
  5. You want to link a "blank" page? ;) Consider this as a feature request.

Yeah, you can probably do that.

Posted by fending on November 10, 2011 at 1:15pm
fending's picture

In serial:

  1. multisite! also, COD can be used for ongoing registrations like training. See training.appcelerator.com.
  2. multisite!
  3. presenters can upload materials to session nodes. drupalcon sites are a good example of this.
  4. assign presenters a Role, tweak all views (like /community) not to show them. theme session nodes not to link to presenter (user) profiles. this is the path of least resistance. Using content_profile (D6) as suggested allows you to set different fields per role.
  5. tweak the views using TPLs for the Events that are not Sessions

I think that'll do it, except for #1 -- I think this would require a new multisite instance for each (hard to say without knowing as much as you do about this!), which will require a little diligence/planning to make sure you're not redoing a lot of config conference-to-conference.