Conference App

The overall conference settings are managed via the conference app.

Conferences and their sections are added and configured via the Django admin.

Models

Each conference needs an instance of a Conference model. In most cases you will only need one of these but Symposion does support multiple conferences sharing a database. Similar to the Django Sites framework, the conference your project is for is selected by the CONFERENCE_ID setting which defaults to 1 but can be changed to the pk of another conference if you have more than one.

The conference model has an optional start_date and end_date indicating when the conference will run. These are optional so you can begin to configure your conference even if you don’t know the exact dates.

The conference model also has a timezone field which you should set to the timezone your conference will be in.

There is also a Section model. This is useful if your conference has different parts to it that run of different days with a different management, review or scheduling process. Example of distinct sections might be “Tutorials”, “Talks”, “Workshops”, “Sprints”, “Expo”. Many aspects of Symposion can be configured on a per-section basis.

Each section has an optional start_date and end_date similar to the overall conference.

Proposals

Create different kinds of proposals, e.g. talk or tutorial, by creating ProposalKind objects. You’ll also need to create a Form in the code for that kind of proposal, and update the setting PROPOSAL_FORMS with the ProposalKind’s slug as key, and the full package path to the form to use as value. For example:

PROPOSAL_FORMS = {
    "tutorial": "pycon.forms.PyConTutorialProposalForm",
    "talk": "pycon.forms.PyConTalkProposalForm",
    "poster": "pycon.forms.PyConPosterProposalForm",
}

To allow submitting proposals for a particular Section of the conference, create a ProposalSection. The site will allow submitting proposals for that Section between the ProposalSection’s start and end, unless closed has been set.

Helper Functions

A conference.models.current_conference() function exists to retrieve the Conference selected by CONFERENCE_ID.