MODULESTUDIO

The „CampManager“ Module has been built mainly for simplifying the organisation of the annual Camp Zikula gathering. The plan was to centrally manage the event at all stages, from planning to execution. This should also be possible for other events beside the Camp Zikula—possibly organised by different people.

For this reason the basic data of an event has not only a title, a target group and a start and end date, but also has two additional text fields: one for the background and another for the administrator's response to the application for holding an event. Further, fields store the address and geo-data of the event location, as well as directions to the location. It is also possible to specify the organising community, an announcement, free-form text fields, and internal notes.

The „state“ field defines the current state of an event (for example, proposed, in planning, finished, etc.). The „acceptedWebsiteTerm“ field stores whether or not the usage conditions have been accepted by the website running the module and promoting the event.

Additional users who should have management permissions for an event are referenced in the eventManager entity. Other entities enable the creation of reports, relevant links and usage terms for the event. The application of interested participants are stored in the eventRegistration entity, and each application has to be confirmed (the eventRegistrationConfirmation entity).

After the Model had been discussed among the team, improving the design at several points, the generation of CampManager with ModuleStudio was started. With that, there was now a complete data layer, as well as some basic functionality. Manual customisations were mainly necessary in the areas of permissions and internal course management. This was because it is not yet possible to model workflows. For example, we had to program the permitted actions and their corresponding operations, such as sending emails with the event usage conditions attached as a PDF document.

With the coordinate fields, an integration of GoogleMaps was implemented. In the next version the modeled coordinate fields are going to be removed and replaced by the Doctrine „Geographical“ behaviour. Similarly, the different „language“ fields can be implemented by using the I10n behaviour.

The CampManager is running on camp-zikula.org. The planning of lecture schedules has been implemented as an independent module, so that it is easily reusable.