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Re: BISA 2010 Conference Homepage
Thanks for that. I’m looking at smd_bio but even bloke admits he hasn’t fully looked at client-side editing.
The reason I asked was to see if someone has got this working in real-life – I’m stuggling with getting mem_self_register to work (but I expect this is entirely something wrong at my end).
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Re: BISA 2010 Conference Homepage
Builders,
Very nice work.
jakob wrote:
The plethora of different admin plugins for custom back-end UI elements and hide-in-admin options shows there is obviously demand for ways to make things clearer for users and the more recent addition of admin themes and pluggable_ui extensions to the core are a step in that direction. While you can combine these to simplify things a fair bit, it still remains a bit clunky for not particular tech-savvy users who don’t understand why they have to think about entering information in terms they are not used to. As soon as it is perceived as being difficult or somehow awkward, the users’ readiness to use it diminishes rapidly.
So true. Being able to customize the admin-side easier (Txp 5 ?) will be nice, but there’s still certain interaction (as dictated by a given project) that will always need super-simplified, and this project is a good example.
Zanza just pointed this post out to me in context of the request thread for an editorial calendar. Specifically he mentioned the Scheduler, which is very interesting indeed, but now even more so to me because I’m also involved with the production of a conference website that will continue to function annually and have various content types: http://csforum.eu. I’ll elaborate on the long-term of that in another thread sometime.
One thing I notice in the SPA conference site is a lack of “Registration”. No surprise there, since it means taking the private data of a lot of people and transferring money. You need secure and reliable gateway for all that, and things like Eventbrite, RegOnline, Amiando, Eventrebels and so forth exist for that reason. The idea being to skin the reg system with the main site’s theme and add the link to the reg process in the main nav. A good example of that is how they do it for the IxDA conference.
So, just out of curiosity, how are people registering for the SPA conference?
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Re: BISA 2010 Conference Homepage
Specifically he mentioned the Scheduler
If you’re interested, do get in touch. The setup above is for one conference with a single stream per day (e.g. no parallel sessions) and you simply have to build a new site for the next conference based on the existing structure. I found that easier to manage than trying to make one txp-installation handle several years of data, events and speakers at once, but Stef did initially suggest ideas for handling several conferences.
So, just out of curiosity, how are people registering for the SPA conference?
Managing registration details is an additional level that a web service can potentially handle well. You can’t see it now as the conference has taken place but we did have a fairly detailed registration form. In this particular case, we used a proprietary system provided by the web firm used by the company that handled the registrations so that they could accept credit card payments direct to their account. It wasn’t ideal in many respects, and much of the registration data handling ended up being done manually on spreadsheets. I provided an html registration form template as a front end.
At the time I made various suggestions including some of the ones you mention, and also a wufoo / paypal combo (you only need the reg form for a few months and wufoo provide a separate data administration UI too with multiple logins and excel export). I quite liked the paypal option as you don’t need to get your hands dirty with credit card details and don’t need a more expensive payment gateway. For US- and UK-based paypal accounts, delegates can pay with their credit card without having to have a paypal account of their own. In Germany, where the registration was being handled, that was not possible at the time (the situation may be different now) and we couldn’t assume that every delegate would have or set up a paypal account.
Additionally, Stef and net-carver have investigated handling paypal so you might want to contact them. You’d need to roll your own delegate administration level, though, which would be quite possible with mem_simple_form and smd_query.
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