Kevin and I are running the web site for this year’s World Fantasy Con, this gives us an opportunity to experiment a little. We’ve done a couple of simple things that any convention could do, because they require nothing more than WordPress and a few plugins.
The first is the online restaurant guide, complete with Google Maps showing how to find each venue. Here’s the index.
The other, which I have just finished, is a filterable program schedule. It is just a simple blog with an entry for each program item, but I have used categories to allow you to select sub-sets of the data. The program participants are in as tags as well, and on the mobile interface those are selectable too. You can find the schedule here.
The are obvious short-cuts with the schedule. Most obviously I have dated everything in 2008 because WordPress doesn’t allow you to publish something with a date in the future. It would also be good to be able to select a combination of categories – say “readings on Thursday”. But the point is that this required no programming – I just created a new WordPress blog and spent a few hours doing data entry. With a little bit more thought and time, and maybe a custom plugin or two, I could do something a lot better.
Anyway, take a look, especially if you have an iPhone, and tell me what you think.
Wow! That is such a great idea! I really like that you can get a list of all the readings and print it out. And you can see all the Guest Events, too.
What a really great idea! I’d love to see this done for all cons (maybe I can figure out how to do this for Foolscap…).
I’ve been playing with it and so far the only glitch I can find is that when I choose “panels” it list all the Panels in reverse order – that is, first Sunday than Saturday and so on – I would expect it to start with Thursday.
Otherwise, this is grand – and something every con could use :>
You could pretty easily hack the WordPress template to add one year to the date displayed of every entry.
Also, perhaps the Wiscon folks would release their panel application as open source.
Twilight:
You have played with WordPress for ConReporter.com, so you already know how to do this.
And yes, the panels are listed in reverse time sequence. That’s because it is a blog. A small template hack would be required to change that.
King Rat:
Yep, template hacks are fairly easy. I’m just snowed under right now.
There are several web-based program packages available. I know that the folks who are doing Eastercon next year have something. But the point of this was that it required no knowledge of programming whatsoever. Even template hacks and the plugins could be easily supplied to any convention.
This looks like a very good idea. One that I will request at the Staff meeting of a convention I am helping at.
Quite handy, and the couple of tweaks mentioned would improve it.
Did you consider including the item time in the entry title? Means that you don’t have to expand as many entries while browsing. If a modified templete is being designed, I assume you could change the date header for each entry to date + time?
Is it practical to use tags to track items that have changed?
Overall a worthwhile exercise, even with the minimal WP configuration that you have done.
Being that everyone’s expectations are set by what they’ve already seen, here’s what I’ve seen for a program search before.
Comparing the two: the most glaring omission in the Orycon schedule ist that it doesn’t have a way to search by track or event type, which the WFC schedule sort of does does, since it appears some rooms are specialized to certain topics or events. For instance, I’ve found one room that has readings, although it would work even better to have a “Reading” tag, since the names of the rooms mean nothing to the first-time visitor.
OTOH, I think Orycon wins in readability right now, not just because of the chronological order, but because the formatting helps you quickly see what’s at the same time and where the break between days is.
I’m curious whether there’s a way to automatically upload the posts and tags? It seems like it could get very tedious trying to maintain them all by hand.
The restaurant guide, now– I think it adapts to the blog format very well. The only comment I’ve got is that coming in with JavaScript turned off, I’d never have known there were maps if this post hadn’t mentioned them.
That, and it’s depressing to be reminded what an amazingly diverse selection of restaurants there is around there… 😛
And I meant to add, this schedule is an interesting demonstration of just how flexible a tool WordPress is.
ErrolC:
Adding times to the datestamp should be a fairly easy template hack.
Petréa:
There is a Readings category.
The WordPress database is all in MySQL. In theory you can create an offline database that exports the necessary scripts to upload everything. Then again, with a decent back-end management system you way be able to do everything online and not need to upload.
I am reminded of the several people who came to ConJosé and afterward complained bitterly about the lack of restaurants because they had not bothered to read the restaurant guide or web site and could not see any restaurants upon exiting the convention center.
OK. I have hacked the template to show the time instead of the year. I’ve also changed the mobile skin to show more data about the item without having to expand it.
Hopefully that makes it more usable.
Interesting!  The program blog would be a lot more useful if it were in chronological rather than reverse order.  Also, the selection of which program participants get tags seems arbitrary.ÂÂ
While experimenting I turned off the mobile theme, and can’t see how to get it back. Not urgent for me, but it should be made easy to fix.
Restaurant guide’s great but the schedule I had trouble navigating. When I looked for my own panel initially I found it on this page:
http://www.worldfantasy2009.org/?page_id=3
but searching my “category” did not bring me to my panel.
ErrolC:
Good catch. It was a theme problem. Fixed now. Thank you!
David:
I see what you mean about the tags. I tagged everyone who was on panel, but the mobile theme doesn’t seem to be picking them all up. I’ll need to look into that. It probably explains Ellen’s problem as well.
The posts are now in chronological order.
Yay for chronological order.
I don’t think this removes the need for a traditional schedule grid, but it seems like it would be especially helpful for when people start planning, to help pick out those three or four program items they won’t want to miss. Including the full descriptions plus panelists and moderator looks especially useful from that perspective.
Also looking at it in that sense, I think it becomes more useful the bigger (or at least the more heavily programmed) a convention it’s used with.
I just wanted to thank you for encouraging people to use the worldfantasycon LJ site, as I felt it’s been underused since I set it up for Saratoga Springs. I hope the use continues.
Lisa:
It has been very useful as a forum for putting together people who want to sell memberships and people desperate to buy one. We might have preferred to provide that service ourselves, but we are not allowed to and thankfully no one on the WF Board has yet demanded that we remove the link to the LiveJournal.
I’d like to think that the surge in interest touched off by people going there this year looking for memberships may carry over to next year, particularly if those people keep paying attention to that community and if WFC2010 decides to post information to it.