COD Beta1: Packed to the gills with features

We are excited to announce the first beta release of COD, the Conference Organizing Distribution.

COD Beta1 is packed to the gills with great features that make managing and attending a conference easier for organizers and attendees.

New features include automated sponsorship sales, a more flexible event schedule, and various enhancements to the registration workflow.

You can download COD today.

Overview of new features in Beta1

1. Enhanced conference administration menu
2. Automated sponsorship sales
3. Birds of a Feather scheduling tool
4. Automated speaker confirmation and contact
5. More granular control over the event registration workflow
6. Collect profile information for free events
7. Session editing for multiple speakers
8. Improved attendee check-in
9. Better Ubercart reporting for purchased registrations
10. Integration with RegOnline and Etouches

For a more complete list of enhancements, as well as a list of key patches integrated into non-COD contributed modules, see the release notes for the COD_Support and UC_Signup projects.

1. Enhanced conference administration menu

As soon as you install COD, an enhanced conference management menu makes sure that common conference site tasks are always a click away.

2. Automated sponsorship sales

With COD, there's no more chasing event sponsors for sponsorship fees and company information. COD prints money!

Sponsors can now purchase their sponsorship on your COD site. They select a sponsorship level, enter details such as logo and link to their site, and pay, all in one transaction. Sponsor managers can then approve and publish the newly submitted sponsorships with a single click.

This feature was sponsored by the Drupal Association and built for the DrupalCon Chicago 2011 site.

3. Birds of a Feather scheduling tool

In addition to COD's moderated session submission workflow, you can now allow conference attendees to submit and even schedule their own impromptu sessions (often known as Birds of a Feather or BoF sessions) . Scheduling is as easy as locating a free slot, and clicking "Add a BoF session."

With some configuration, you can also have different rooms and time slots used on different days of your conference as we did for Drupalcamp Colorado 2011. Rooms can also have sponsors.

This feature was sponsored by the Drupal Association for DrupalCon Chicago and by GVS.

4. Automated speaker confirmation and contact

Previous versions of COD included a robust session moderation workflow. COD Beta1 adds the ability to send a personalized email to speakers of sessions at each stage in this workflow (proposed, accepted, declined, confirmed, scheduled).

When a session is accepted and scheduled, conference organizers can ask speakers to confirm each individual session that's been accepted and scheduled, ensuring that all speakers are able to attend their assigned session times.

View a screencast of this feature on Vimeo.

This feature was sponsored by the MeeGo 2011 and CODESTRONG 2011 conferences, and built by GVS.

5. More granular control over the event registration workflow

At the heart of COD's paid registration workflow is the UC_Signup module, which allows one person to purchase a ticket for herself and/or multiple other people.

Some user profile fields are critical for event registration, while others are important for user account creation. COD now allows you to specify where these fields are presented to users, so that you collect the right information in the right place, without cluttering up forms with unnecessary fields.

For example, the following screenshots show the "Emergency contact" field, which has been configured to appear when registering for an event, but not when creating a user account.

This feature, along with several significant enhancements to the UC_Signup module were sponsored by the PowerShift 2011 conference, and built by GVS working with Advomatic.

6. Collect profile information for free events

If you're not charging for event attendance, you may wish to skip the checkout workflow entirely.

With COD Beta1, you can now add any user profile field to the Signup form for free events, allowing people to fill in required fields and register for an event, all with a single form submission.

This feature was sponsored by the GNOME/KDE Desktop Summit and built by GVS.

7. Session editing for multiple speakers

Often, more than one speaker will present a session together. Thanks to enhancements and integration with the nodeaccess_userreference module, each speaker can edit their session when they are listed as a speaker.

This feature was sponsored by the MeeGo 2011 conference.

8. Improved attendee check-in

Attendee check-in can be a high pressure time for any event. COD's new attendee check-in view makes it easy to record who attended, and the new "attendee manager" role and permissions make it easy to empower your team-members to help with check-in.

This feature was sponsored by GVS, and was based on enhancements made for the Design for Drupal Boston 2011 conference.

9. Better Ubercart reporting for purchased registrations

More detailed, customized ecommerce reports are just clicks away. The UC_Signup module now ships with a Views relationship that connects purchased signups with Ubercart orders, allowing you to create powerful, custom reports with the UC_Views module and without writing a line of custom code.

Thanks to j.payne for contributing this enhancement.

10. Integration with RegOnline and Etouches

Some conferences have an established relationship with hosted event registration solutions like RegOnline and Etouches but want to integrate these registration systems with a more fully-featured conference website. You can now integrate these external systems with COD using the RegOnline API and Etouches API modules, which were written for and sponsored by the DrupalCon Chicago 2011 and MeeGo 2011 conferences, respectively.

What's next

Of course, Beta1 isn't the end of development on COD. Here's what we've got planned for the future:

COD-specific base theme

Sheena Donnelly of Top Notch Themes is working on a fabulous base theme optimized for COD. You can follow this work in the issue queue.

COD for Drupal 7

Right now, we recommend that site-builders use this latest beta for new sites. However, there's a lot of great excitement around a version of COD for Drupal 7.

Thanks to the San Diego and DrupalCamp Colorado COD sprints, the first development steps for converting COD to Drupal 7 are under way. You can help to get COD updated to Drupal 7 by reviewing patches in the COD and COD_Support issue queues! An overview of the steps is on groups.drupal.org/cod.