I’ve been working a soon-to-be-released app called “OpenCFSummitWare” (a.k.a. “Engage” but that name was taken on Google Code) for a while now, and it’s the application we’ll be using to manage proposals, scheduling, and attendee information for OpenCF Summit.

The inspiration for the application is the excellent OpenConferenceWare that was created for the Open Source Bridge conference. Obviously we want to run a CFML conference on a CFML app, but it saved me countless hours by having an extremely strong model on which to base our new application.

OpenConferenceWare is written in Ruby, and since I have zero experience with Ruby (at this point anyway) it took a bit of work to install the app and get it up and running. With a bit of help from the OpenConferenceWare Google Group and some tenacity I got it running, so I thought I’d share the step-by-step process here.

Note that this assumes you’re starting with a clean system or at least one that hasn’t ever had Ruby (and some of the other tools outlined below) installed on it. You can do this all in one shot, and probably in a much more logical order, so what you see here is the step-by-step I went through as I ran into missing items while trying to install OpenConferenceWare. (Note that I am * not* doing the optional MySQL database steps, so I think it uses SQLite by default.)

1. Install git:
   sudo apt-get install git
2. Clone the OpenConferenceWare git repo:
   git clone git://github.com/igal/openconferenceware.git
3. Install Ruby:
   sudo apt-get install ruby
4. Install Ruby Gems:
   sudo apt-get install rubygems1.8
5. Install additional tools necessary for building and compiling:
   sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev build-essential gcc autoconf libtool
6. Install the MySQL development libraries:
   sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev
7. Install XML/XSLT libraries:
   sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev
8. Install SQLite3 libraries:
   sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev
9. Install rake:
   sudo apt-get install rake
10. Install the bundler gem:
    sudo gem install bundler
11. Install the MySQL gem:
    sudo gem install mysql
12. Create a symlink to the bundle command:
    sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/bundle /usr/local/bin/bundle
13. Go into the openconferenceware project directory you cloned in step 2 above:
    cd openconferenceware
14. Install the necessary libraries for the application:
    bundle install
15. Update the styles:
    rake bridgepdx:styles
16. Set bridgepdx to be the default theme.
    1. Navigate to openconferenceware/config
    2. Create a new file called theme.txt
    3. Add the following line to theme.txt:
       bridgepdx
    4. Save the file
17. In the openconferenceware directory, create the databases:
    rake db:create:all
18. Finish the database creation, populate database with sample data, and set the admin password:
    rake setup:sample
    (If you don’t want any sample data, just do rake setup instead of rake setup:sample)
19. Startup the app:
    ruby script/server
20. Navigate to http://localhost:3000/admin and log in!

Pay special attention to step 16 if you’re getting an error along the lines of “bridgepdx theme broken”–that simply means you haven’t set a default theme in openconferenceware/config/theme.txt

Final note: this setup is intended for running on a local development box, not for production! If you’re interested in additional performance and security settings for production, make sure and check out the installation instructions on github.

Thanks to Igal and the entire team for such a great open source conference management app on which I could model the app we’ll be using for OpenCF Summit!