Mediacurrent discusses using COD for the Pegaworld 2011 conference

Dave Terry from Drupal development shop Mediacurrent spoke to GVS about Mediacurrent's latest COD site implementation for the Pegaworld 2011 conference.

Thanks, Dave and Mediacurrent for sharing your experience with everyone!

GVS: Can you tell us a little background about MediaCurrent, Pega, and the
Pegaworld event?

DT: Mediacurrent was founded in 2007 by two life-long friends, who shared
a common vision of building a web development consultancy around an
open-source based CMS. They chose Drupal and have not looked back.
Mediacurrent is located in metro-Atlanta, Georgia with a mostly
distributed team that is based in the Southeast United States.
Mediacurrent primarily builds new Drupal websites or helps support,
fix, and improve an existing Drupal site. We strongly believe in
open-source principles, collaboration, and sharing knowledge to
strengthen the Drupal community.

Pegasystems is a 350M software company that is based in Boston,
Massachusetts. In 2010, Pegasystems was named the 8th fastest growing
company in the world by FORTUNE magazine. They are a recognized
industry leader in business process management (BPM) and a leading
provider of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. They
have been a Mediacurrent customer for over a year. We redesigned their
corporate site (www.pega.com) in Drupal and then they approached us
with another opportunity called PegaWORLD.

PegaWORLD is an annual conference that brings together BPM thought
leaders from the world’s leading organizations to discuss best
practices. There are high-quality sessions and training opportunities
that allow attendees to learn about BPM. The 2011 event was held in
Orlando, Florida.

GVS: What led you to choose the Conference Organizing Distribution for this site?

DT: We felt like many of the out-of-the-box features COD offered were a
good fit for this project. We liked the way that COD provides content
types like session and time slot with Views for rendering an agenda.
More specifically, the default COD setup was similar to the needs for
the PegaWORLD agenda page. Since COD uses CCK + Views we assessed that
it would be easier to modify the COD features we needed than build our
own functionality from scratch.

GVS: Were there any parts of COD you had to enhance or work around to meet
their needs?

DT: Since PegaWORLD is the only sponsor of the event, we did not need to
leverage the Sponsor feature-set within COD.

GVS: Which COD features helped the site the most?

DT: The session grid was definitely the most helpful. COD makes it easy to
build a grid schedule with session times and rooms. Each PegaWORLD
attendee could create a session schedule to meet their own personal
preferences. In short, the grid display was a real time-saver on the
project.

GVS: What improvements did you make that you're most excited about?

DT: The biggest change we had to make was adapting the code for multiple
events. Pega had a need to host not only PegaWORLD, but other smaller
events throughout the year. They wanted a true multi-event setup. To
accomplish this we added an ‘event’ content type and then referenced
it from all the standard out of the box COD content types. We had to
modify the session grid logic in the COD session module to account for
the node references and ensure each schedule only returned the
appropriate rooms, time slots, tracks, and sessions. Since
registration is being handled through a third-party system, we didn’t
have to account for multiple events on the Drupal side for checkout or
adjust any of the views for attendees. The modular approach taken in
the architecture of COD really allowed us to customize only the parts
we needed. The IA for the distribution really is well thought out.
The other option is to use one instance of COD for each event and then
tie everything together with the Bakery module that is akin to
Drupalcons, but Pega wanted everything together in one site.

The other change we made was the addition of jQuery that allowed the
session track titles at the top of the page to highlight the COD
session classes on the schedule. The page is a panel that prints the
session tracks (taxonomy terms) on the top and the schedule (view
display) on the bottom. We reversed the COD session regex in
javascript to add the dynamic highlighting feature. The code has been
contributed back to the COD Support issue queue.

GVS: What recommendations do you have for someone considering COD for an event site?

DT: As with any project, we would just recommend doing a thorough
requirements analysis to see if COD offers the feature-sets that you
are looking for. For the PegaWORLD site, we were extremely pleased
with how COD could be leveraged.

GVS: What features would you like for your next COD site?

DT: Overall, we found COD to be a very powerful distribution. It was
extremely flexible and allowed for easy customization. We were able to
separate features by simply disabling functionality where it did not
meet Pega’s specific requirements. The only immediate feature we would
suggest is .ics support for syncing up third-party calendars.