New Features and a Look Towards the Future
09 Aug 2010Oh, hello there user group organizers and attendees. I didn't see you there! It's good that you're here. It's been a while since we've updated you on what's going on in the gathers.us factory and we've got a lot going on.
We've tried hard to listen to what you guys really want from gathers.us, so we've been pulling a lot of new functionality (and fixing stuff too) using our public forums at User Voice.
Well, don't just stand there! Come on in and have a look!
Redesigned Front Page
So immediately going to gathers.us, you'll notice that we've updated the front page. We've kept the easy to follow instruction on how to get your own gathers.us event going, but we've also added a listing of a few upcoming events. From there you can click the "Find More" button that will take you to our events listing page, a view of all upcoming gathers.us events happening. This is the first of many steps to help gathers.us fans to find events that might be of interest to them.
Permalinks (1)
This is probably the most requested feature from our users; to have user readable (read: rememberable) URLs for their events. We really wanted this too, so we got right on it. For now we generate a slug based on the title of your event. In the unlikely event that your gathering's title is the same as another, we'll just tack on a few random characters on the end to make it unique.
Change My RSVP (2)
Since we do not require users to register with gathers.us in order to RSVP for an event (or create an event for that matter), we had to think a little bit on how to let users choose to change their RSVP for an event. What we settled on is giving attendees the ability to input the email address they provided with their RSVP, and with the click of a link from a confirmation email, the attendee can choose remove their RSVP from an event. Attendees can also contact their event organizer who has the ability to change event RSVPs as well.
Export to Calendar (3)
This feature was one that was personally meaningful to us, along with being part of a requested feature. Having an event on our calendars to help coordinate with significant others the user groups we attend is important. Also getting an iCalendar file that we can download with all the information about any event and import into our iCalendar-compatible calendar is extremely helpful. We were able to make light work of this using the iCalendar ruby gem and beauty of how Rails allows you to configure mime-types and renderers.
Limiting RSVPS for an Event (4)
The impetus for gathers.us was for organizing the ChicagoDB users group and limiting RSVPs is a feature that ChicagoDB needed very early on to help cull the group and make the best use of the space that is available to us. In Chicago, space for user groups is very limited so this seemed like an important feature to get done up front. Also, as a workaround, event organizers are able to "close off" the ability to RSVP by making their RSVP limit be equal to the number of current RSVPs. Very useful.
Remember my Information (5)
Lastly, pulled from our User Voice suggestions, since gathers.us "lacks" a true user account, users wanted the ability for gathers.us to remember information about themselves, so that future RSVPs and event creation would require just a "click" of the RSVP button. At the same time we pulled in the use of a CAPTCHA (using reCAPTCHA) to make sure that we limited the amount of spam on our users' event pages. We wanted to make this as unobtrusive as possible, so after a few iterations we've moved the CAPTCHA into an inline popup window (modal) to verify one's "humanity." After that users should never see the window again as we trust you to be a human and be nice to our events.
The Future
The future holds some interesting things for gathers.us. Our focus is on the idea of user group events, and making the process of organizing and attending as simple as possible. With that in mind, we're currently working on the "groups" portion of that. As we continue to focus on user group events, like ChicagoDB which has monthly events, we want to give attendees and organizers a single point to manage information and subscriptions. Soon after, we will be focusing on giving our users a full-fledged API to make use of gathers.us group and event information on their own sites and applications.
We're really excited about the future of gathers.us and we hope you are too! If you have an suggestion on how gathers.us could be made better for you, please drop us a line on User Voice. We'd love to hear from you.
-- The gathers.us team