A Tour of ScheduAALL 2009

Earlier today I launched ScheduAALL 2009, a personal scheduling application for attendees of the 2009 AALL Annual Meeting and Conference, July 25th - 28th, in Washington, D.C. The feedback thus far has been positive, which is a relief to me following about 3 weeks of nonstop work getting it ready.

Given that 27 people have signed up and are using the site at the time of this post, I hope that things are pretty self-explanatory. Nevertheless, I thought it would be a good idea to provide a walkthrough of the site.

A quick note on the technical aspects: I built ScheduAALL using Acquia Drupal. There are plenty of contributed modules in heavy usage (CCK, Views, Workflow, Mollom, etc.), but the ability to create personal schedules — and save other user's schedules — relies primarily on the Flag module. I'll follow up shortly with another post that goes into more detail about how the site is put together. For now I'll focus more on the user end.

When a new user comes to the site, this is how the front page appears to them:

At this point anyone can browse through the conference schedule, but in order to utilize the personalized schedule functions, a new user account must be created by clicking the "Register" link. Simply fill out and submit the registration form, and you have an account:

To create an account, you only have to provide a username, password, email address, and first & last names. Optionally, you can also upload a photo and provide other details about yourself which will be visible to other users if you opt to make your profile public.

In order to find conference events, you can use the search bar at the top of the page, or you can browse using the links at the top of the page:

Using the links at the top of the page, you can view the complete conference schedule in chronological or alphabetical order:

You can also view the schedule for a specific day:

Or you can browse specific types of events:

When you find an event you want to add to "My ScheduAALL" (your personalized conference schedule), simply check the box next to the event:

To view further details about a specific event, just click on its title to be taken to the summary page:

Any events you check will automatically be added to your personalized conference schedule, My ScheduAALL. To view your schedule, click the My ScheduAALL link at the top of any page:

If you want to print My ScheduAALL, click the "Printer-Friendly Display" link to load a black and white version of the page suitable for making hard copies:

If you decide to keep your schedule private, this is all you need to do to build your schedule. If, however, you'd like to share your schedule with other registered users on the site, you'll need to turn on your Public Profile. To do this, click the link labeled "My Profile" just below the Find Events search box:

By default, after you create your ScheduAALL user account, your profile is set as Private, indicated by the red status box at the top of your profile. To make your profile public, click on the Edit tab and find the Profile/Schedule Sharing settings at the bottom of the form. Select "Public" and submit:

Now the red status bar on your profile will be replaced with a green one, indicating that other registered users on the site can see your profile, including your schedule:

To see all other users on the site who have Public Profiles, click the "Find People" link (right next to the "My Profile" link):

When viewing another user's profile, you'll have the option of saving his or her profile to your own personal list of Saved Schedules. Just click the green link at the top of each profile labeled "Save this Schedule":

Now any profiles you choose to save will appear on your Saved Schedules page, linked at the top of the page:

That's pretty much it!

Over the next week or so I'll be adding some additional functions, including:

• An RSS feed for new events
• A contact form to send me updated information about events so I can add it to the site
• The ability for users to add personal events  to their own schedules

Also, sometime before July I hope to create a mobile version of the site so conference attendees can use ScheduAALL on their mobile devices while at the conference.

As new information and events is added by AALL, I'll do my best to keep ScheduAALL up-to-date, but please be sure to always check AALL's official conference website for the most accurate and current scheduling information.