fudcon.in - online face of FUDCon Pune 2011

My involvement with FUDCon Pune 2011 started since the initial days of its planning. I wasn’t much involved until I took the task of managing a website for the event. My idea was to have a fully dynamic website where users could login, submit talks, vote for talks and we could manage the content all in a single website. The plan is available here.

After a few initial discussion about FUDCon websites here and there, Rahul arranged for a domain fudcon.fedoraproject.org and commit access for me, so that I could add content to that website myself. Tatica was already working on a static website for FUDCon Milan by then. It took time for me to understand how is this going to work out for our purpose. I converted those static pages to genshi templates and pushed them fedora-web. To make the context clearer, all the code for Fedora websites can be viewed using this git repository. In the meantime I wasn’t able to help with the updates on FUDCon website for a month, so Shreyank took up the responsibility. Anyways, genshi templates sounded a bit ancient to me. The setup generated HTML pages only ( of course they are localized etc. ). But it was not solving the problem we had started with - no dynamic content, no databases ? So, anyways, I thought and discussed with our FUDCon Pune team here. Since we were very near the event we didn’t have much time. It would have taken long to get the website up on Fedora Infrastructure as it has it own guidelines and process. Finally I decided to pull up a COD based installation for the website on a separate domain and hosting space so I bought one.

Vaidik came up as a volunteer during that time and took charge of a lot of tasks. His efforts deserve immense appreciation. We had another volunteer Harvish Sekar for the website. ( all the open and closed tasks can be found here ).

Thats how FUDCon Pune 2011 Website is in existence today.

Things that don’t work at present:

• COD distribution of COD has Conference Moderation -> Contact Speakers feature. This wasn’t working because Views Send module wich is packaged is broken. Due to this we used mass_contact module.  http://drupal.org/node/1200584
• Website generates wrong links for the uploaded slides: For example instead of following link ( with /sessions/ in the URL ) http://fudcon.in/sessions/sites/default/files/slides/Practical_Linux.pdf Use a URL like this( without /sessions/ ) http://fudcon.in/sites/default/files/slides/Practical_Linux.pdf
• We can’t upload tarballs in the talk content. ( Thanks to Siddhesh for reminding! )

It has been a journey with many surprises and roadblocks. Thanks to all the people in order of involvement over time. Rahul Sundaram for giving a nod for this website our way when it was getting tough to do it the Fedora Infrastructure way. Tatica for providing intial designs for the website. Suchakra for graphics and artwork for FUDCon Pune 2011 ( you’ve done an amazing job! ). Amit Shah for valuable suggestions and counter-suggestions that helped in refining our plans. Shreyank for interim responsibility with updates and fixes to the earlier website - fudcon.fedoraproject.org. Vaidik for large amount of contributions with themeing and many other enancements to COD installation for fudcon.in. Harvish Sekar for configuring the countdown timer. Siddhesh for helping me with scheduling sesions and making sure that we are doing it in the right order - i.e. constraint based scheduling. And many more people who were involved in this effort.

Needles to say we have made avaialble all the source code on github. Just checkout the wiki ( link at the end ) for all the information you would need to setup.

Where is all the information: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:India_2011_website_devel http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:India_2011_website http://openetherpad.org/fudconweb-devel