SD Meeting Tool

Introduction

SD Meeting Tool is a Wordpress plugin that can be used to administer meetings and conferences. It was originally written by the Sweden Democrat party for internal use.

SD Meeting Tool is free software, as per the License.

Description

SD Meeting Tool was written to handle organizational and governmental meetings and conferences, by providing participant, voting, checkin, checkout, printing services, etc.

Requirements

• At least one technically-minded person to administer the internals of the tool: creation of participants, lists, actions, registrations, etc.
• A Wordpress installation.
• Javascript for the administrators and, optionally, for visitors that want automatic refreshes.

Some features, such as automatic updating of shortcodes for visitor pages, will require powerful hardware. The reason for this is that most shortcodes are completely dynamically generated without caching possibility. Having several hundred or thousand visitors requesting AJAX-updates of speaker lists or agendas will bog down Wordpress (being a generally slow CMS to start off with).

Keeping the amount of visitors to a minimum, or even better: keeping the site internal and private, is recommended until further notice.

Optional requirements

• Functionaries to handle registrations, polls, etc.
  Having several funtionaries speeds up registrations, votes, etc. Each should have access to a computer.
• Barcode scanners.
  Some plugins use barcodes to quickly scan in participants. One scanner per functionary computer is suggested.

Installation

Activate at least SD Meeting Tool Base together with following plugins, which are needed for basic functionality:

• Plugin: Actions creates and handles actions.
• Plugin: Display Formats controls how participants are displayed internally.
• Plugin: Lists puts participants into lists.
• Plugin: List Sorts sorts lists.
• Plugin: Participants specifies who is partaking in the meeting.

The following plugins are included in the base package:

• Plugin: Agendas allows for several agendas.
• Plugin: Displays displays lists to visitors.
• Plugin: Elections allows participants to vote.
• Plugin: Printing prints participants as PDFs.
• Plugin: Registrations handles registration UIs and actions associated to UIs.
• Registration UI: Text Searches registers users by searching for text strings in the participant's display format.
• Plugin: Speakers maintains a speaker list for each agenda.

Since SD Meeting Tool uses Wordpress actions and filters to transmit data between plugins, other, more advanced plugins, can be used instead of the provided modules.

Activate the base plugin first and then the other plugins. Each plugin specifies which other plugins are necessary for correct function. See the documentation pages for each plugin.

Usage

There are two main concepts that are the foundations of SD Meeting Tool: participants and lists.

Participants

A participant is simple a number with a unique number of participant fields attached. The fields themselves have no meaning to SD Meeting Tool and act as random data. The number is an ID number that is passed between plugins that work with the participants.

Participants can be easily imported from spreadsheets using the import function. As long as there is an ID column the participants will be imported.

Lists

Lists are collections of participants - and sometimes even other lists. Almost all SD Meeting Tool plugins uses lists in some way or other so it is important that the admin begins thinking in "lists of participants" before using SD Meeting Tool. The flexiblity of lists, including the ability to include and exclude participants in other lists, allows lists to help with:

• checking in (via registrations)
• checking out (via registrations)
• printing
• speaking
• voting in elections (registrations and results)
• etc.

See SD_Meeting_Tool_Lists for more information on how to manipulate lists.

Plugins

SD Meeting Tool by itself does very little. Most of the grunt work is done by the various included plugins, depending on need. See the documentation of the respective plugins.

Tips

• A dedicated machine for the meeting is a good idea if you plan to allow for lots of visitors. Wordpress is notoriously slow to start up, therefore requiring quite a powerful machine to allow for many automatic AJAX updates of the speaker list and agenda and such.

Developers

SD IT welcomes patches and new features from the public. Send all patches to the author.

If you wish to write new SD Meeting Tool plugins there are interfaces in the include/ directory that provide a quick refeference.

Most of the code is relatively well documented using Doxygen syntax.

Plugins

The plugin system of SD Meeting Tool uses the same plugins, hooks and filters that Wordpress uses. The included SD Meeting Tool plugins can be replaced with more advanced plugins if necessary, as long as the replacements use SD Meeting Tool filters and actions.

Libraries

SD Meeting Tool uses the following libraries, included in the base package, that are written by others:

• FPDI (http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/fpdi/) to import exisiting PDFs.
• JQuery Tablesorter (http://tablesorter.com/) to sort html tables.
• TCPDF (http://www.tcpdf.org/) to create PDFs.

License

This software and all included plugins is licensed under the GPL, version 3.

Author

Sverigedemokraterna http://www.sverigedemokraterna.se

Edward Plainview edwar.nosp@m.d.pl.nosp@m.ainvi.nosp@m.ew@s.nosp@m.verig.nosp@m.edem.nosp@m.okrat.nosp@m.erna.nosp@m..se