Other tools

Website, mail & files

Three build-and-communicate tools organizers run without a developer: a conference website with a draft/publish cycle, an e-mail center with filtered recipients and templates, and one shared file center.

The conference website

Every conference can publish a public website at www.smartchair.org/hp/<conference code>/. The site is a set of pages; each page keeps a draft and a published version, so work in progress never shows publicly. Publishing archives the previous version — the last five are kept, and any of them can be previewed, restored into the draft, or deleted. The site's look comes from a choice of layout templates, or a fully custom template for conferences that bring their own HTML and CSS.

The e-mail center

Conference e-mail is sent to filtered recipient sets, not pasted address lists. Participants can be selected by registration status, paper status (including each review result), payment status, or paper version — or directly by e-mail, user ID, or paper ID. Committee members are selected by role, with an option to include confirmed members only. Messages support saved templates, per-recipient variables (name, registration type, paper title, review report, links), attachments — including per-recipient attachments matched by a file-name pattern — and a mandatory preview step before anything is sent. A BCC address can receive a copy of everything.

Two companions: the welcome e-mail, sent automatically when a user first enters the registration page (its text is a template the organizers edit), and personal e-mail, a one-off editor for individual messages such as review result notifications.

The file center

One store per conference for shared files: website assets, distributed documents, uploads. Every file gets a short stable label (F1, F2, …) and a permanent download link that keeps working even if the file is replaced — the same link can safely sit in website pages and e-mails. Access is organizer-only; the links themselves are public.