Some years ago we started developing the Drupal Conference module at the University Duisburg-Essen. This effort grow out of the need to organise a moodle conference. The module was first designed to work with Drupal 4.7. At this time, the only module offering the ability to create customized node types was Flexinode -- today there is Content Construction Kit. Also the Workflow module wasn't there. So this version of Drupal is long ago and things have changed. Of course there is still a need for a simple and tailored module to organise conferences with Drupal. But I would like to encourage opening ones mind that Drupal today offers modules which can be used to construct a similar functionality. Especially if one has requirements not served by the Conference module this can show that Drupal is a very flexible content management system that easily can be customized to different needs. Of course this effort requires more knowledge of Drupal in detail -- or can be a reason to learn it.

I would like to introduce some modules and explain a possible configuration of them to design a Drupal system for organising an academic conference with submissions and a review process:

• Content Construction Kit: This frequently used framework offers the ability to create node types with custom fields. I would propose creating a node type "submission" with a text field for an abstract and a file upload field to submit an article.
• Workflow: With this module node types can be embedded in a process covering a workflow to be done with the nodes of this type. For every state of a workflow one can define user roles with permissions for changing the state to the next state. A workflow for submissions to an academic conference can be made up with the following states: editing a submission, posting a submission, assigning a submission to one or more reviewers, reviewing a submission and done.
• Wokflow Fields: This module extends the Workflow module by enabling individual CCK fields in a workfow state to be be viewable and/or editable to user roles. So I would propose adding several fileds to the node type "submission" for the result of the review process (or: for the results of many review processes). The Workflow Fields module is necessary to hide these fields to the user while the submission is created or reviewed.
• Content Access: One need to consider which users can view and edit submissions. Without any additional node access module, one cant specify individual roles with view/edit access to submissions. I would prefer not to be too restrictive: a role based content access can be sufficient. Within a role based concept, all reviewers can theoretically review all submissions. But it's a different task which submissions are shown to an individual reviewer in his/her workspace. If a reviewer can even edit the submissions not shown in his/her workspace, one may be better prepared for unexpected occurrences like illness. Content Access can be used to configure this node access rules.
• Views: At least one can use the Views framework to build an individual workspace with a to-do list for every reviewer. I would propose adding a user reference field to the submission node type (perhaps as a multivalue field for multiple reviewers) for storing the assignment to the reviewer/s. Then create a to-do list with showing all submissions assigned to the logged in user. A second to-do for the conference organiser is useful showing all posted submissions not assigned yet.
• Consider using the Content Locking module to avoid a submission being edited by two reviewers simultaneously.

Well actually we needn't organise a second conference with Drupal until now. So I have to notice that we neither contribute to the developement of the Conference module any more (thanks to zyxware for doing this job now) nor we tested this drupal configuration with a real conference. But we realized some workflow configurations in Drupal 6 covering similar scenarios. So it's very likely to me that this configuration works.

If one uses online learning management systems like Ilias or Moodle, one needn’t pose the question: "What is a course?". Courses are an universal structure of arbitrary content types like pages, files, forums, wikis etc. sorted in time. But what if one has the chance to more specify a course? Could it be interesting if a course is -- lets say -- just a wiki?

Currently we design and implement a learning management system from scratch with drupal. This system will be used in an established program of study. Therefore many requirements are given and especially courses have been considered to be mainly like forums so far. But I suppose that having the opportunity to more specify a course in an online learning management system offers advantages. Courses need not to be structured widgets any more and can be more concert objects. Advantages can be:

• The way courses are implemented in learning management systems represent the way how the learning process happens. In a program of study one can focus special ways of learning by offering a more concrete course structure to teachers.
• Different online courses are experienced to be more consistent in a learning management system. Students can better recognize the structure of courses and therefore better find one's way.

Because Drupal is original a content management system, it offers the flexibility to specify courses. Using organic groups as courses one can choose the content type of a course. After a long discussion we decided to choose books as course types now:

Organic groups is an important feature in drupal, especially in educational contexts. Organic Groups can be groups of students learning and collaborating together. Organic Groups can also be complete courses in a program of study. If this courses are taught as distance learning or online learning, they usually contains learning documents and therefore re-usability is an important demand. The possibility of cloning or coping groups with its content is very important to use Drupal as a learning management system.

Regrettably cloning nodes is not an easy task in drupal. Many content types, in particular those providing a functionality, are implemented in modules and depends on special data structures or external resources. Cloning a book or a forum makes less sense without cloning its subpages or contributions.

Nevertheless there are two modules providing an sophisticated framework for cloning content in drupal. Node Clone is the basic module. It can theoretically copy any node type as a single node without its relations to other nodes. Practically it is necessary to test this module with a particular node type and perhaps adapt it. This module does not include attachments or comments. Book Copy is build on Node Copy and offers the possibility to clone entire books. It calls Node Clone for every book page and reconstructs the dependencies afterwards.

For cloning groups with its content it seems as if these two modules are a valuable effort. An other module alike Book Copy is necessary to call Node Clone for a group node and Node Clone resp. Book Copy for every content node and finally reconstruct its relations. Because often learning materials contains downloadable files, including attachments in the clone process would be generally a good cause.

Actually we have written a prototype of the OG Clone module and therefore can attest that this concept works so far. The intension is to create a learning management system based on drupal and to offer online courses with drupal.

As far as I found out, drupal 5 does not provide an easy way to offer customized rss feeds. The Views RSS modules features a page view as rss feed, but the feed it generates does not include the fields of a view. The feed rather contains the title and a link to the corresponding note for every item. A first attempt to improve the rss page view is made here, but until now no module has been written to implement a new view style plugin. So I took the the code snippet and included it in a drupal 5 module with some improvements.

The new module View List RSS offers the following features:

• A new and customizable rss page view for the Views module. The rss feed includes all fields defined in the view. The rss item tags are labeled like the label of the corresponding feed. The description-tag of an item can be merged by two or mode fields.

• Change the default rss feed of the website to a customized feed provided by a rss page view.

The conference module allows you to organise conferences with drupal 4.7. It implements a mechanism to post papers, to manage reviewers and to assign reviews to papers. A paper is an aritrary node whith an attached file and a review is an arbitrary node assigned to a paper. It also takes care for the access permissions to papers and reviews:

1. every author can only see his own paper
   
2. every reviewer can only see his own reviews but download the pdf-files attached to the papers assigned to him
   
3. a manager can see both and create assignments

The conference module does not implement note types for papers and reviews. It is designed to cooperate with the content constriction kit or flexinode (cck is suggested). So you can provide a review questionnaire that suit your needs.

There is one important point in this concept: The pdf-filed assigned to a paper-node must not containt the author names!

About this module

This module is sponsored by the university of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). It has been written to organize the german moodle conference 2007. Licence: GPL.

Just a little detail: do you like the way how the trackback-module displays the trackback-url on your drupal-site? There's a simple way to change this behavior. It requires some little changes in the module-source, but perhaps that will give you an understanding of the programming of drupal-modules...

At first have a look at the trackback.module file, especially on line 261:

$node->body .= theme('box', t('Trackback URL for this post:'), url('trackback/'. $node->nid, NULL, NULL, TRUE));


this line themes the trackback-url. Unfortunately the theme-function "box" is used to do that. The box-function creates an html-code enclosed by <div class="box">. Because there are many occurrences of this class, and it's not only used to theme the trackback-url, you can't style the trackback-url by this class in your CSS-file. To solve this problem, use a new theme-function like this:

$node->body .= theme('trackbackurl', t('Trackback URL for this post:'), url('trackback/'. $node->nid, NULL, NULL, TRUE));


Now, drupal will call the theme-function "trackbackurl" to theme the url. The next step is to create this function. The best place to do this is right here in the trackback.module. Insert the following code at the end of the file:

function theme_trackbackurl ($title, $content, $region = 'main')
{
$output= '';
$output.= $title.''.$content.'';
$output.= '';
return $output;
};


Now you can style your trackback-urls in your CSS-File. Add something like this:

.trackbackurl {
font-weight: bold;
color: #9e4040;
margin-bottom: 20px;
}

.trackbackurl .url {
font-weight: normal;
font-family: mono, courier;
color: black;
padding-left: 20px;
}