The overall conference settings are managed via the conference app.
Conferences and their sections are added and configured via the Django admin.
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.
Adding a new kind of talk (or tutorial or poster session, etc) requires several steps.
First, define a new ProposalKind object and add a new migration to create an instance of it if there isn't one already. The new object must have a unique slug, which we'll call the kind_slug.
Next, define a new model in pycon/models.py, inheriting from PyConProposal or a more specific model, whichever seems appropriate.
After the model, add a call to register the model for that kind_slug:
register_proposal_model('talk', PyConTalkProposal)
Next, define a new form in pycon/forms.py, again inheriting from whatever existing form class seems appropriate. The form needs to be registered too:
register_proposal_form('talk', PyConTalkProposalForm)
To allow submitting proposals of the new type, create a new Section object
for the conference, and a corresponding ProposalSection object. The site
will allow submitting proposals for that Section between the ProposalSection's
start and end, unless closed has been set.
A conference.models.current_conference() function exists to retrieve the
Conference selected by CONFERENCE_ID.