Split 2 submissions type in Presentations page

[mendesrocha]

Hi!

We have two submission types in OCS. One for individual authors, other for multiple author (we called it panel presentations).

However, in the Presentations pages these two types of submissions are placed all together.

Is it possible to split them in the Presentation page? Whereby an option view, where I can see the individual, and the panel presentations separately?

Thanks in advance

Renato

[jmacgreg]

Hi Renato,

When you say "two submission types" do you mean conference track types? Presentations should be grouped by track on the Presentations page.

Cheers,
James

[mendesrocha]

James,

Yes, they are grouped by track in the page. But what our editors want is to group them in the submissions types defined in the conference setup > step 2. submission > individual and multiple-presentation.

Att
Renato

[jmacgreg]

Hi Renato,

Unfortunately, that is not currently supported. How would you have your papers grouped -- by track and within that by type, or by type only? Would it suffice if each presentation were marked as a panel/single presentation on the Presentations list, eg. by the word "Panel" or "Individual Presentation" automatically appearing beside each title listing?

Cheers,
James

[tshore]

This is a pretty serious deficiency. For the last two years, I remedied this by adding "Symposia" and "Keynote" as tracks. That way, the panel presentations and keynotes were listed separately from the regular talks and posters:

http://www.imrf.info/2009/schedConf/presentations

Within each track, I also listed the talks first and then the posters. This was all SO MUCH WORK, that I now see why I put off upgrading to the latest version of OCS until this year.

I have now upgraded to your most recent release and I was VERY disappointed that this feature hasn't re-surfaced. Also, I can't see any way to distinguish between talks and posters? I also spent a lot of time customizing this feature - both in OCS 1 and 2. Here is how I would like it to look:

http://imrf.mcmaster.ca/IMRF/2007/papers.php

I would like to have further separated the talks from the posters in the "Refereed Papers" section, but I never got around to that. You can see whether it's a talk or poster once you are on the view abstract page. The separation of invited and refereed talks is important as is the separation of symposia. The other very important feature of this is when you click the symposium titles, you can see all of the talks that are part of that symposium. This was also carried over to the scheduler.

When, if ever, can we expect to see such features integrated into OCS 2.x? I need to know whether I should go ahead and start hacking away at the code, or if I should just leave it alone already, knowing that these ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL features are coming soon. I would be happy to share code (albeit for OCS 2.0) and meet with you in order to assist with this process.

[jmacgreg]

Hi Trudy,

Yes, sending us code samples, preferrably in unified diff patch format, would be the best way for us to evaluate and possibly incorporate changes you have made into our codebase. It's of course impossible for us to add these changes without seeing them, and probably difficult if not impossible for us to deal with 2.0 changes in 2.1.x, although it's still worth posting what you've done here. Please keep in mind that while we're interested in the solutions you have come up with, we have to develop our software with an eye towards future maintainability and flexibility.

You can always create a diff from your previous OCS installs and try to port your changes over to the newer version as well; and there's nothing to stop you from using previous versions (well, anything newer than 1.1.7, anyway -- that version and previous do include a security bug).

Cheers,
James

[tshore]

I'm still desperate to have this functionality in the latest version of OCS, but I have no idea how to send code samples in "unified diff path format".

[asmecher]

Hi Trudy,

Depending on what kind of server you have, the patch tool may already be installed. (Most *NIX servers will have it in place.) For Windows servers, you can download patch and diff from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/patch.htm.

You can use "diff" to generate a patch (a patch file and a diff file are the same thing) file, and "patch" to apply it to another installation.

To generate a unified diff file, you'll need a copy of the software as we shipped it, and a copy with your modifications. Then you can generate a diff describing the differences between them as follows:[code]diff -u -r -N /path/to/unmodified/version /path/to/modified/version > /path/to/patch-file[/url]...if /path/to/unmodified/version is your unmodified version, /path/to/modified/version is the path to the modified version, and /path/to/patch-file is the patch file you want to save. (-u specifies unified format; -r says to compare all directories and their contents; and -N says to include newly added files.)

Go through the saved file and remove anything related to cache files; you should be left with your modifications only.

More information is available at e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_(Unix).

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team