A mobile-friendly guide for conventions, with all sorts of spiffy features.
KonOpas is free, open-source software distributed under the terms of the ISC license:
Copyright (c) 2013-2014 by Eemeli Aro <eemeli@gmail.com>
Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for
any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the
above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
The software is provided "as is" and the author disclaims all
warranties with regard to this software including all implied
warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall the author
be liable for any special, direct, indirect, or consequential damages
or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits,
whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action,
arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this
software.
KonOpas is a front end for the programme of a convention, conference or any other single- or multi-track event. It's written in JavaScript, and it works in practically all modern browsers, including those on mobile phones. It can use HTML5 caching to make itself available even without a live net connection, and it remembers your item selections across sessions.
The hosting requirements for KonOpas are minimal, as all the processing is done by the browser; all the files are served statically. Some back-end scripting may be required if you require live updates of the programme during the event.
The open-source KonOpas client can also talk with a dedicated KonOpas server. The server enables item sync across different browsers, devices and calendar apps; item-specific voting and commenting; and allows the event organisers to track which items were the most popular. To enable server access for your event, please get in touch with us at: info@konopas.org
For links to example instances of KonOpas, take a look at the links from our website.
As KonOpas is just a front end for your event's programme, you'll need to actually manage your programme with a different tool. So far we've got built-in integration with at least Conference Planner/Grenadine and Zambia, with more to come. For smaller events, a simple PHP script is included for fetching data from a publicly readable Google Drive Spreadsheet and converting it to the KonOpas format.
Once you've got your programme data in the proper format, you can use
our configurator to get you started with customizing KonOpas for your
event. That'll produce snippets of HTML that you can place into the included
index.html file, mainly so that you can get the initial filters to match your
programme data (each item's day, location and tags, if any). You should tune
these to your liking, and follow the included examples for second-level menus if
necessary. Don't forget to change the data/program.js and/or data/people.js
scripts that are included from index.html! Accessing the programme database at
a different domain should be fine, provided that it's not served over HTTPS.
KonOpas takes a few optional parameters that you should define with the
konopas_set object; to see what's available, take a look at the src/app.js
file. To change the gudie's appearance, you should make changes directly into
index.html, eg. replacing the title graphics with your own. For more in-depth
changes such as changes to the color scheme or fonts, you'll need to edit the
skin/*.less files and recompile them into CSS. For internationalization and
other needs, we have a few other utilities available.
The HTML5 cache manifest is by default not enabled, as it makes testing and
development a bit of a hassle. To enable, you should update the contents of
cache.manifest to match your deployment and add a reference to it in the
<html> tag. Do check that your server is properly serving it with the
text/cache-manifest MIME type, and that the manifest doesn't include itself,
as debugging a bad manifest can be tricky.
For most use cases, KonOpas should be usable directly. However, if you'd like to change things such as the interface language, or if you'd like to just poke under the hood in general, you have two options based on different build environments, make and gulp.
For styling, KonOpas uses LESS, which requires compilation into CSS if modified. This should make it easier for you to tune the default skin to match your needs.
For internationalization, we use Alex Sexton's messageformat.js. If you'd
like to implement your own localization, the easiest way is probably to use our
online i18n js generator and to save the output as i18n/$LC.js. So
far localizations include English, Finnish, and Swedish.
Using make will require separately installing the LESS and messageformat.js dependencies, but only if you intend to change the styling or localization source files.
A Makefile is included, with a default target dev for a development version
and prod, which minifies the previous using the javascript-minifier.com
service's HTTP API. These targets will also modify the appropriate <script>
tag in index.html to reflect the version in use.
If you've Watchman installed, make watch will start it with triggers for
automatically updating the JS & CSS files during development.
To automatically install the dependencies required by gulp.js, run
npm install in the directory in which you've installed KonOpas. Then try
running gulp --locale en to get a list of the available targets.
The gulp.js build system was implemented for KonOpas by Aarni Koskela.
We have a public mailing list that you're welcome to join, or just follow online.
