It’s been a busy time here at Statrix. I am just winding up two years worth of volunteer work as the webmaster for a conference held here on Oahu this past weekend. Admittedly the first year wasn’t particularly daunting. But starting in January 2010 things started to pick up.
I’m not going to say much about the conference itself, but I will say that being part of the host committee and seeing all our work come to fruition was one of the most gratifying experiences of my life.
For the website I used a combination of Drupal and CiviCRM. For the most part everything worked beautifully. I will say that anything that did go wrong was probably my fault and not that of the software.
Drupal is a pretty well known CMS and I don’t have much to say about it other than it works great. CiviCRM on the other hand is a tool not everyone needs, unless you need a really good Open Source constituent management system.
We used CiviCRM to:
- Sign up initial contacts
- Sign up volunteers
- Register attendees in conjunction with PayPal
- Bulk mail attendees with monthly updates
- Track mailings (opens/opt-outs/etc)
- Create some reports (others were hand coded)
I’m probably missing something but even so it’s pretty obvious it did a lot and did it well.
Sadly I came down with a virus the week before the conference so I was pretty much out of it for most of last week. I could, thankfully, diddle the data when required: and it was. I also had to rouse myself and present a paper as well as lead a late night discussion. I managed both of those tasks on adrenalin.
I’m quite thankful I had the opportunity to participate and, though in some ways I’m sorry it’s over, quite glad I’m almost done. There’s still wrap-up work to do and that will continue for another month or so, but nothing on the order of what I’ve just been through.
I am, once all is said and one, quite done in!
Aloha.