A mobile-friendly guide for conventions, with all sorts of spiffy features.
KonOpas is free, open-source software distributed under the terms of the ISC license.
KonOpas is a front end for the programme of a convention, conference or any other single- or multi-track event. It's written in JavaScript, and it works in practically all modern browsers, including those on mobile phones. It can use HTML5 caching to make itself available even without a live net connection, and it remembers your item selections across sessions.
The hosting requirements for KonOpas are minimal, as all the processing is done by the browser; all the files are served statically. Some back-end scripting may be required if you require live updates of the programme during the event.
Built and tested for a growing number of large and small conventions and conferences, KonOpas is about as easy to use as possible. With automatic filter rule generation from your data, KonOpas can be set up for your event by just adding your name and logo to an HTML file, along with pointers to your programme and participant data.
The open-source KonOpas client can also talk with a dedicated KonOpas server. The server enables item sync across different browsers, devices and calendar apps; item-specific voting and commenting; and allows the event organisers to track which items were the most popular. To enable server access for your event, please get in touch with us at [email protected].
For links to example instances of KonOpas, take a look at the links from our website.
As KonOpas is a front end for your event's programme, you'll need to actually manage your programme with a different tool. So far we've got built-in integration with at least Conference Planner/Grenadine and Zambia, with more to come. For smaller events, a simple PHP script is available for fetching data from a publicly readable Google Drive Spreadsheet and converting it to the KonOpas format.
To get started, you should download the latest release of KonOpas, which includes the compiled & minified Javascript and CSS files. Alternatively, if you clone the repository, you'll have a much easier time of making changes to the skin or hacking the Javascript source, but you'll need to compile the code yourself---instructions for that are in the following section.
Once you've got your programme data in the proper format, you should
just change the <script> tags at the bottom of index.html to point to your
data, and open the page in a web browser. If all goes well, you should see your
programme nearly ready to use! If there are problems, the first place to look
for more information is your browser's developer console.
To start customizing KonOpas for your event, edit the HTML file by replacing
stand-in phrases like KonOpas Sample Guide and CONVENTION as appropriate.
The title and title-small images are the logo that's displayed at the top of
the page; there are two as you may wish to use a different graphic for the wide
and narrow-aspect layouts. Near the bottom of the file you'll find the KonOpas
instantiation, with optional customizations.
For more in-depth changes such as changes to the color scheme or fonts, you'll
need to edit the skin/*.less files and recompile them into CSS. For
internationalization and other needs, we have a few other utilities
available.
The HTML5 cache manifest is by default not enabled, as it makes testing and
development a bit of a hassle. To enable, you should update the contents of
konopas.appcache to match your deployment and add a reference to it in the
<html> tag. Do check that your server is properly serving it with the
text/cache-manifest MIME type, and that the manifest doesn't include itself
(debugging a bad manifest can be tricky).
For most use cases, KonOpas should be usable directly. However, if you'd like to change things such as the interface language, or if you'd like to just poke under the hood in general, you'll need to recompile it.
For styling, KonOpas uses LESS, which requires compilation into CSS if
modified. This should make it easier for you to tune the default skin to match
your needs. skin/main.less is the place where the
colourscheme is set.
For internationalization, we use messageformat.js, which is based on ICU MessageFormat syntax. So far localizations include English, Finnish, and Swedish.
To compile KonOpas for yourself, you should clone the git repo and install the dependencies using npm. The following commands should get you set up:
git clone https://github.com/eemeli/konopas.git
cd konopas
npm install
make all
The all and dev make targets will build the browser-ready KonOpas in the
dist/ subdirectory; make precache gzips some of the more compressible output
files for use on servers that where a config
like this is in use. If you've Watchman
installed, make watch will start it with triggers for automatically updating
the JS & CSS files during development.
To change the default (English) locale of KonOpas, use the LC variable:
LC=en,fi make all
Once set, the same locale will be used until reset as above or by make clean.
We have a public mailing list that you're welcome to join, or just follow online.