Where should I start setting up a scheduling website?
April 13, 2015 1:15 PM Subscribe
I have a friend who has inherited the job of coordinating some organized play lines at a local gaming convention. He needs something to help get everyone pointed in the same direction and schedules put together without needing to do it all on paper. I have slightly more web experience and access to either WordPress or Joomla host.
(You can skip the next two paragraphs if you only want to suggest tools and pluging and don't need extreme details on the use case.)
Organized Play is a general term for the sort of shared world tabletop games, also sometimes called Living Campaigns. They're sometimes fan run and often at least partially sponsored by the publishers. There are standardized rules and adventures so players can carry a character from home to conventions, with different people and still have a coherent experience. This is the site for the new D&D Adventurers League and the site for Paizo's Pathfinder Society as an example of the sort of thing that goes on.
These events are generally run by volunteers who have their own game preferences and schedules. So John might be able to run Game 1 modules, but only after 6pm, and Hannah knows Games 2 and 3, has Saturday afternoon booked and is otherwise clear, and so on. Games generally fit into four hour slots. This is what the Friday schedule looked like last year. If you look at the line that starts with NAGA and ends with the RPGA lines, that's about the volume to be expected, with the understanding that if more than eight people show up for a slot, they may wind up running an additional table of one of those, and some of them might not get enough people to run and get canceled.
My friend needs something where he can give each volunteer a separate login and access to a calendar where they can enter what timeslot they want to work, and what they want to present in that timeslot. They should be able to see only what they enter, but my friend should be able to see and edit the whole calendar so that he can submit a completed and balanced schedule to the people running the convention. I know that there must be a lot of existing tools to do this sort of thing, but I need a starting place. Am I better off sticking with WordPress because of its wide adoption? How much can be done just plain out of the box? What plug-ins (preferably free) are good choices to arrange something like this?
Basically, where do I start?
(You can skip the next two paragraphs if you only want to suggest tools and pluging and don't need extreme details on the use case.)
Organized Play is a general term for the sort of shared world tabletop games, also sometimes called Living Campaigns. They're sometimes fan run and often at least partially sponsored by the publishers. There are standardized rules and adventures so players can carry a character from home to conventions, with different people and still have a coherent experience. This is the site for the new D&D Adventurers League and the site for Paizo's Pathfinder Society as an example of the sort of thing that goes on.
These events are generally run by volunteers who have their own game preferences and schedules. So John might be able to run Game 1 modules, but only after 6pm, and Hannah knows Games 2 and 3, has Saturday afternoon booked and is otherwise clear, and so on. Games generally fit into four hour slots. This is what the Friday schedule looked like last year. If you look at the line that starts with NAGA and ends with the RPGA lines, that's about the volume to be expected, with the understanding that if more than eight people show up for a slot, they may wind up running an additional table of one of those, and some of them might not get enough people to run and get canceled.
My friend needs something where he can give each volunteer a separate login and access to a calendar where they can enter what timeslot they want to work, and what they want to present in that timeslot. They should be able to see only what they enter, but my friend should be able to see and edit the whole calendar so that he can submit a completed and balanced schedule to the people running the convention. I know that there must be a lot of existing tools to do this sort of thing, but I need a starting place. Am I better off sticking with WordPress because of its wide adoption? How much can be done just plain out of the box? What plug-ins (preferably free) are good choices to arrange something like this?
Basically, where do I start?
http://www.when2meet.com is an alternative to Doodle.
posted by redlines at 2:59 PM on April 14, 2015
posted by redlines at 2:59 PM on April 14, 2015
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by scottso17 at 8:20 AM on April 14, 2015