I volunteer with two couple of festivals (an art festival and a family/main street type thing), and I was wondering if there were any existing web applications to specifically manage these types of things, as they're different from conferences and other types of events. Features I'd be looking for would include:
- Users can submit their application form (and for those with a cost, either mail a check in separately, or maybe submit credit card info sometime in the future)
- Users can check the status of their application (if it's been approved, space and/or time they've been assigned)
- Supports multiple queues of applications (parade, food vendors, art and crafts vendors, entertainers, advertisers, etc.)
- Users could submit to multiple queues easily (an entertainer, in the parade, and you want an ad in the program? They don't have to fill out 3 forms with duplicate info)
- Could generate daily reports of the status of the queues (either to let people know there's new submissions, or to let someone know that something's been unread in the queue for too long).
- Generates web pages with info from the approved queues
That much, I think I could probably work out myself, if I had the free time to sit down and code, but some other really nice things would be:
- Support for scheduling multiple stages & generating a nice display for people looking at the site.
- Support for some sort of mapping software to assign vendor locations
- Ability to generate mailings (email and paper) to send to participants with info, customized for them (ie, scheduling for the entertainers, location assignment for the booths, etc.)
...
Maybe I'm not looking for a whole stand-alone app, but just the right add-ons for some CMS like Drupal or Plone ... if there's no one thing that does everything, I'd love to hear what might be out there to at least help with a submission of the application forms, as that takes up much of our time -- with each person managing their own database, and then having to pass updates to the person doing the website, the person doing the program, and the people handling traffic control, etc.
