Suggestions and Future Ideas

Here’s a few of the things that have been either suggested or have come from my mind for future improvements to the site:

“I’m Attending” for sessions
Add a button/feature allowing attendees to plan out their schedule (similar to the DreamSchedule thing ZendCon used)

Speaker summary page addition
Ex. they can see the last talk comments since they logged in/mark as read

Compare speakers?
Allow groups putting on a conference to quickly and easily get feedback on a set of speakers – comparing them on number of talks, number of comments, quality of comments and rankings.

Reoccurring events
like user groups or monthly meetings…set it up once, forget about it

• create all events when the setup is done
• create them based on the reoccurence (start of the month, start of the week, etc)

customizable feedback form?
In addition to the general ranking, possibility for an additional set of answers to be asked for the event feedback. Not sure how useful this might be, but recording the issue

Enhancements to the tracks functionality
A few extra things: some way to assign tracks to sessions more than one at a time – update the XML import to support optional tracks

Page for group (ex user group) to post talk ideas for voting, etc
Hey… just a quick question/suggestion for joind.in. I saw the PHPBenelux and was wondering if you could set up user groups like you do conferences, so that the group has a single page that lists talks for multiple dates and people can vote on them?

Flickr integration
Based on the tags defined by the event admins, fetches the related images from flickr and thumbnails them into a cache directory (based on the event ID).
$tag=‘phptek’; $url=‘http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=’.$tag.‘&lang=en-us&format=rss_200’;
Multiple tags at once? Slider slideshow?

Add pagination on the (web page) View All Events
Ajax-loaded contents pulled from the API (would require the API getList for events to support pagination too)

Create “you should look into…” notification
Create a way for people who are giving a talk at an unlisted event can send an “official email” to the event’s staff and let them know about Joind.in

Send to Twitter when…

• A new event is approved
• Message sent to user’s account when they comment on a session

sorting on search results
by default, order by date
dropdown to allow for other search methods?

Add thumbnails to speaker profile pages
To make viewing the uploaded image easier
[added 05.22.2010]

Linking sessions to tweets
Somehow matching up sessions to the tweets that are set during/after an event to their sessions. Special hashtags maybe?
[added 05.22.2010]

Setting that would allow sharing of slides even when event is private
Makes sharing the content of the session easy for those that weren’t invited
[added 05.22.2010]

Allow speakers to contact commentors
This would give speakers a direct feedback tool to ask questions if they don’t want it to be a public comment
[added 05.22.2010]

Cropping tool/Different sizing for event image upload
Some events have requested the option to have a custom size on their image rather than the current forced size. Having a tool to allow cropping might help with that (javascript-based I assume)
[added 05.22.2010]

Add in grouping/tagging functionality
This would allow things like user groups or companies trying to group together their events. Easier than categories?
[added 05.22.2010]

Add “source” to the comment info
Give a better idea of where the comment came from – website vs api
[added 05.22.2010]

cron jobs for events on the site
Could send messages from queues, tweet about upcoming events, etc (system is in place, example exists)
[added 05.22.2010]

Schedule Builder
Allow attendees to create their schedule for the event, allow sharing/showing their schedule publicly, allow speaker to see potential attendee list and ability to print schedule in PDF format.
[added 05.27.2010]

Talk “Cloning”
It would be really nice to have a link next to the “create new talk” link that copies all the information from the talk you just created. That would be a real time saver, and probably not that difficult to implement.
[added 05.31.2010]

Email Speaker when their Talk is Added
When creating a talk, it would be awesome if you could add a speaker email field and a checkbox to automatically email that speaker once the talk is created. I had to manually write 21 emails asking each speaker to claim their talk last night. I think this could easily be automated.
[added 05.31.2010]

Show attendance on dashboard
Show if a user marked themselves as attending for future and previous events (on the user’s public profile page too?)
[added 07.20.2010]

Treat an Event like a Talk
Allow an event that’s only one session to have the talk rating features
[added 08.10.2010]