Seminar System Issues

Below is a list of known bugs and missing features for the Seminar System. It will be present for the first couple of months of operation of the System, whilst it is being brought into widespread use. If you have an addition or clarification to make to the list, please let me know.

Dave G

Frequently Asked Questions

Non bug-related information for users:

Can I get at the database information directly?
What is the format of the database?

The data is stored in a relational database running on a secure web server. The data cannot be viewed except through the Web interface. This is necessary to make the web server standalone.

Plain text seminar lists are presented all on one page (unlike their paginated HTML equivalents). It should be possible to save one of these pages to a file and search it with "grep".

What?! Where is [insert series here]?

If there is missing seminar series please contact me by email.

The structure of [insert page here] is not good because [insert problem here]. Can it be changed?

There is a lot of information to present, coming from a variety of sources. I am keeping a list of proposed changes, which I will review with the series adminstrators some time in the future. Please don't hesitate to contact me with your views on the system.

Known Issues

These are bugs and missing features that have been identified and are on a list of immediate fixes to perform. They should be resolved in the near future:

Wish List

This is a list of bugs and missing features that have been identified but have been postponed for future development. They will be left unresolved until it is decided that the Seminar System should be updated:

Online "meta-administration"

This is a list of bugs and missing features that have been identified but have been postponed for future development. They will be left unresolved until it is decided that the Seminar System should be updated:

Online editing of email templates

Email templates are stored in text files that need to be edited by hand. Obviously a web form would be more convenient.

"Assistant" organizers

There are people other than seminar organizers who help out with the arrangements for seminars and speakers. These people should be given read access to the administrator-only information on the server, without actually being able to edit it. Such information would include:

• private notes fields
• PDF posters
• sending emails (??)

Downloadable slides / notes

We could have a space on the web server from which slides and notes could be downloaded. Once such a space is set up, it would be simple to have an automatic "upload" control that provides an organizer with a file chooser dialog, uploads the file to the server and automatically presents it for future downloading.

Sub-series within series

Some seminar series have guest sub-series from time to time (e.g. Steve Vickers' talks in recent Topology seminars). These sub-series cannot be represented with the current database structure. It might be possible to introduce this feature.

More advanced host support

Hosts' contact details are not currently stored in the database. The addition of this feature would be useful, but ideally should not impose any extra burden on the seminar organizers. One way of doing this would be to add a list of regular hosts who can be selected with a single mouse click.

Reminders for speakers

An extra email facility would be useful, allowing series organizers to:

• remind speakers about forthcoming talks
• request an abstract if an abstract has not already been sent

Automatic scheduling of emails ("cron" emailing)

It would be nice if emails could be sent automatically at some suitable time. Organizers would need to be able to activate / deactivate this feature.

"SeminarTag" language for quick cross referencing

Tags to cross reference between seminars and series would be useful. For example:

• This seminar is held jointly with the [series dept]Departmental Series[/series].
• See the speaker's [seminar 142]previous seminar[/seminar] for mor information.

Layout on PDF posters

The posters handle abstracts by converting them to plaintext and doing some simple formatting on the result:

• paragraphs are spaced at 6pt
• if the abstract overflows the page, it is truncated and an elipsis (...) is placed at the end

This works for the most part but makes abnormally short or long abstracts look a little silly. Possible enhancements include:

• adding a little "intelligence" regarding line spacing and font size to handle abstracts of abnormal length
• adding a simple "formatting options" page to allow the series administrator to alter the layout / abstract
• adding functions to convert HTML to PDF control tokens to support bold, italic, underline and teletype formatting simple list bullets.