KonOpas

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 <[e-mail]>

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.

Description

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.

Built and tested for a growing number of large and small conventions and conferences, KonOpas is about as easy to use as possible. With automatic filter rule generation from your data, KonOpas can be set up for your event by just adding your name and logo to an HTML file, along with pointers to your programme and participant data.

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: [e-mail]

For links to example instances of KonOpas, take a look at the links from our website.

Getting Started

As KonOpas is 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 available for fetching data from a publicly readable Google Drive Spreadsheet and converting it to the KonOpas format.

To get started, you should download the latest release of KonOpas, which includes the compiled & minified Javascript and CSS files. Alternatively, if you clone the repository, you'll have a much easier time of making changes to the skin or hacking the Javascript source, but you'll need to compile the code yourself---instructions for that are in the following section.

Once you've got your programme data in the proper format, you should just change the <script> tags at the bottom of index.html to point to your data, and open the page in a web browser. If all goes well, you should see your programme nearly ready to use! If there are problems, the first place to look for more information is your browser's developer console.

To start customizing KonOpas for your event, edit the HTML file by replacing stand-in phrases like KonOpas Sample Guide and CONVENTION as appropriate. The title and title-small images are the logo that's displayed at the top of the page; there are two as you may wish to use a different graphic for the wide and narrow-aspect layouts. Near the bottom of the file you'll find the definition of a Javascript object konopas_set that's used to configure the guide.

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.

Compilation & Dependencies

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. Support for multi- lingual instances requires messageformat.js 0.2.0 or later.

make

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.

gulp

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.

Discussion

We have a public mailing list that you're welcome to join, or just follow online.