Frequently asked questions

Questions about the Meeting

• What is VCMS?

  A content managment system to easily set up an online conference! Simply install on a webhost and enter information and you have a completly free conference system.

• Is there a method to add payment?

  Currently there is not. But it should be easy to use stripe or paypal to add payment.

• How to install

  Refer to the instructions on Github.

Poster Session

• What is voting for virtual posters

  Each user gets a certain number of votes (configurable in the VCMS-settings).

I want to use this system but how?

• When can I start using this?

  Soon! Before people use this on production systems I first want to get the documentation up an running and weed out eventual bugs.

• What do I need to run a site like this?

  This system is PHP based and runs on a wide variety of webhosts (Basically any webhost that supports Wordpress). For smaller event a small hosting account is likely enough as the heavy parts of the site like the poster list are static and only the comments are dynamically fetched from the server. If you expect more than 100 concurrent users on the site you likely should use a virtual server in your university as those will have more RAM and CPU power than a shared hosting account.

• Is this free?

  Yes. The code will be released as open source under the Mozilla License. Let's have more virtual meetings and reduce our times spent traveling and contribute to a healthier planet!

• I need to add a feature, how do I do this?

  The system is extensible. You need either some basic HTML/PHP knowledge, knowledge in Vue.js and some customization stuff can also be done completly without touching the code. 

  If you want to add new fields to the user registration for example you can navigate to the Modules-> Login Register section and add new Fields.

• What features does this system have?

  Currently there are: 

  • Abstract Managment including Author List, CSV Export, Declining of submission in the backend
  • Connection to Mailchimp. Emailing participants can be cumbersome. Each user is signed up to a Mailchimp Mailing List (free plan of 2000 subscribers) which takes care of sending mails, double opt in and GDPR regulations
  • Timezone dependent scheduling of events in a convenient interface
  • Virtual Poster Session with Voting and Commenting Functionality
  • schema.org metadata for each talk and the conference. 
  • Caching of most files for fast page views and handling of medium amounts of traffic. If you expect large traffic (>500 users on the site at the same time) consider buying the ProCache Module of processwire and/or moving the site to a dedicated server in your university.
  • Templates for Code of Conduct, Abstract regulations, Privacy Policy so you do not need to rewrite them from scratch.

• Can I try the admin interface?

  Yes. 

  Navigate to http://vcms.simonduerr.eu/processwire and enter

  user: editor
  password: vcmstest2020

  All functionality to save data has been disabled.