frab - conference management system

frab is a web-based conference planning and management system. It helps to collect submissions, to manage talks and speakers and to create a schedule.

Current Status

frab is not under heavy development anymore. Releases merely mark huge updates and add a changelog. There are no separate release branches, fixes and development happen in main. We want the main branch to be usable at all times.

frab has been used to organize FrOSCon since 2011, a conference with more than 100 talks (and as many speakers) in more than 5 parallel tracks (plus devrooms) over 2 days. frab is also used by the Chaos Communication Congress.

The frab wiki hosts a list of conferences using frab. Feel free to add your conference to the wiki.

Take a look at the screenshots to get an idea of what frab does. The full manual can be found in the wiki.

Installing

frab is a pretty standard Ruby on Rails application. There should be plenty of tutorials online on how to install, deploy and setup these.

See installation for more frab specific information.

It's possible to run frab via docker, or on a PaaS like heroku or dokku.

Rake Tasks

These are executed from the command line to export conferences and static schedules, send emails or help with development. The manual has a chapter on rake tasks for production.

More documentation on available rake tasks can be found in the wiki or by running rails -D.

Ticket Server

frab supports OTRS, RT and Redmine ticket servers. Instead of sending event acceptance/rejection mails directly to submitters, frab adds a ticket to a request tracker.

The ticket server type can be configured for every conference.

Install the iPHoneHandle support if you're using OTRS.

Localization

Frab's UI has been translated into several languages: de en es fr it pt-BR ru zh. If a translation for a text is not found, production systems will fallback to the I18n.default_locale as configured in config/environments/production.rb.

Frab chooses the UI's language, by looking at the ?locale= URL parameter first. If that is unset or contains an unsupported language, Frab falls back to the clients HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE header. If neither value is in the list of supported languages, frab uses English.

Conferences, events and persons have languages, these are displayed in the schedule and are used for the notifications feature.

The mail notification feature sends mails to speakers. It sends those notifications in a language the speaker has configured and falls back to English. Also tries to find a match between the conference locales and the speakers locale.

Localization for model fields, like the event's description is provided by the mobility gem. This allows frab to publish texts for the same resource in several languages:

• event title, subtitle, description, abstract
• person description, abstract
• track name

If a field has no stored translation, the supported languages will fallback to the I18n.default_locale. The unsupported languages, will return nil, until a translation is stored.

Frab uses the models database column, e.g. 'title', for the default language (I18n.default_locale), other languages are stored in separate database tables. Mobility calls that a column fallback, it helps with existing installations and avoids JOIN statements if only one language is used.

The default language is assumed to be English (I18n.default_locale), but could be changed in an initializer.

History

frab was originally created for the organization of FrOSCon 2011. FrOSCon has previously used pentabarf (http://pentabarf.org), and although frab is a completely new implementation, it borrows heavily from pentabarf.

Both FrOSCon and frab owe a lot to pentabarf. But sadly, pentabarf seems to be abandoned. And several problems make it hard to maintain. Thus we decided to create a new system.

License

frab is licensed under an MIT-License. It bundles some third-party libraries and assets that might be licensed differently. See LICENSE.