Best way to organize and present conference agenda with multiple organizations

[Norine Leibel]

This isn’t a support question so much as needing guidance and recommendation.
I have a conference website, multi-day, multi organization.
Organization A has part of day 1, with say 7 sessions in their agenda, plus breaks and lunch. Venue might be Ballroom A, but lunch might be in Ballroom B. Organization B has day 2, with more or less the same idea, (although there might be some time overlap), and because they’re smaller, they may be in a different room of the same conference centre. And so on, 8 days and 14 organizations in total,

For one organization’s agenda, is it best to make that organization an “event category” ? And would one item on the agenda (eg: the speaker from 9-10 am) be one event? How would I best organize and present that so it doesn’t look like 7 big events, each repeating venue and organizer? Rather make it look agenda-like, with venue and organizer repeated just once for that organization’s meetings.

Apologies if this is obvious, but I’m really not sure how best to approach this. Thanks!

[Rob]

Hey onelittlemoose! I appreciate the note and apologize it’s taken me until now to get you a reply…as you can probably tell by your own experience so far, we’re a bit backlogged at the moment.

You raise a good question here. Managing conferences is definitely a bit of a challenge with the current plugin. We started work on – and hope to finish in the coming months – our own Conference Manager add-on that accomplishes pretty much exactly what you’re asking for here, and lays it out on the frontend with specific conference-centric views as well. I wish that were far enough along for me to offer you a beta because I’d love to hear your feedback (you’re the exact type of person it’s geared towards).

In the interim, when it comes to “faking it” with what the current codebase allows: it does look like using categories would probably be the most flexible approach (unless you found a way to make the frontend “Venue” pages serve as Organizations instead, which might add value since it puts a map/address atop the page).

Here’s an idea: what if you presented this in categories, but laid out using photo view? It has a posterboard type layout that, when broken out into categories, would make it fairly evident what sessions fell where without repeating a bunch of unnecessary information (and without making a huge list that people were unlikely to scroll too).

That help? Sorry I couldn’t offer up more, but I hope this points you in the right direction. Let me know if not or if this raised more questions than it answered.

[Norine Leibel]

Thanks, Rob. It sounds a bit complicated, but I will take a look. My gut says maybe for this go around I can get away with agendas in the TablePress plugin, given that the site is already a little behind schedule. I sold the redesign based on responsive, and not on an events management system, so that might have to suffice for now.

Yes, I think there would be a definite market of a Conference manager plugin. I’ll be first in line.

[Norine Leibel]

This reply is private.

[Rob]

Hey again onelittlemoose. Thanks for this; admittedly, it does sound like what you’re going for here is probably not something that’s super easily done out of the box. If my “hack” above doesn’t do the trick it does seem like TablePress might be a good route. I haven’t played around with it myself so I’m not sure of the specifics…but realistically it’d probably provide more flexibility.

Happy to have you on the beta list for the conference manager, whenever we pick it up again! Sorry I couldn’t offer you more of a solution until then though.

[Norine Leibel]

Thanks, Rob. Given the approaching deadline for this site, I will probably go with what I know and use TablePress for now. But yes, looking forward to the beta conference manager.

[Rob]

Excellent to hear, and sorry we couldn’t be more helpful in the timeline required. Going to close this one…but if you need anything more, just holler 🙂

[Author]

Posts