Quill

Registration, for hackers!

Quill is a registration system designed especially for hackathons. For hackers, it’s a clean and streamlined interface to submit registration and confirmation information. For hackathon organizers, it’s an easy way to manage applications, view registration stats, and more!

Features

Quill for Users

Dashboard

After users login, the Dashboard displays the user’s application status and status-specific prompts to resend a verification email, view/edit their application or confirmation forms.

Statuses:

• Unverified: users have not verified the email address they registered with
• Incomplete, registration open: the user has not submitted their application, but the registration deadline has not passed
• Incomplete, registration closed: the user has not submitted, but the registration deadline has passed
• Submitted, registration open
• Submitted, registration closed
• Admitted / unconfirmed: the user has been admitted to the event, but has not confirmed their attendance and submitted their confirmation form
• Admitted / confirmation deadline passed: the user has been admitted, but did not confirm their attendance before the deadline
• Waitlisted: the user was not admitted to the event
• Confirmed: the user has been admitted and has confirmed their attendance
• User declined admission: the user has been admitted, but will not be attending the event

Application

The Application tab takes users to their registration or confirmation form.

Team Registration

Hackathons commonly allow participants to register and be admitted as a team. The Team tab allows users to create or join a team with other users.

Quill for Admins

Admins can view stats, look through applications, or edit settings from the Admin panel.

Stats

The Stats tab summarizes useful registration statistics on the number of users in each stage of the process, demographic information, and miscellaneous event preferences like shirt sizes, dietary restrictions, or reimbursement requests.

Users Table

The Users tab displays a table of users where admins can:

1. Search for a user by name
2. Quick-view user applications in a pop-up modal
3. See a user’s application status (verified, submitted, admitted, and confirmed) at-a-glance
4. See responses to other miscellaneous fields on the application
5. Open and edit an individual application
6. Admit users manually
7. Mark users as checked-in at the event day-of

Settings

On the Settings tab, admins can easily control their event application timeline by setting registration / confirmation deadlines. They can also write custom waitlist, acceptance, and confirmation copy that users will see on their dashboard throughout the application process. The custom copy is interpreted as Markdown, so HTML and images can be added.

Setup

Quick deploy with Heroku

Requirements

Requirement	Version
Node.js	10.13+
MongoDB	4.0+

Run the following commands to check the current installed versions:

node -v
mongo --version

How to upgrade to latest releases:

• Node.js: https://nodejs.org/en/download/
• MongoDB: https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/administration/install-community/

Deploying locally

Getting a local instance of Quill up and running takes less than 5 minutes! Start by setting up the database. Ideally, you should run MongoDB as a daemon with a secure configuration (with most linux distributions, you should be able to install it with your package manager, and it'll be set up as a daemon). Although not recommended for production, when running locally for development, you could do it like this

mkdir db
mongod --dbpath db --bind_ip 127.0.0.1

Install the necessary dependencies:

npm install

We use dotenv to keep track of environment variables, so be sure to stop tracking the .env file in Git:

git update-index --assume-unchanged .env

Edit the configuration file in .env for your setup, and then run the application:

gulp server

Customizing for your event

If you're using Quill for your event, please add yourself to this list. It takes less than a minute, but knowing that our software is helping real events keeps us going ♥

Copy

If you’d like to customize the text that users see on their dashboards, edit them at client/src/constants.js.

Branding / Assets

Customize the color scheme and hosted assets by editing client/stylesheets/_custom.scss. Don’t forget to use your own email banner, favicon, and logo (color/white) in the assets/images/ folder as well!

Application questions

If you want to change the application questions, edit:

• client/views/application/
• server/models/User.js
• client/views/admin/user/ and client/views/admin/users/ to render the updated form properly in the admin view

If you want stats for your new fields:

• Recalculate them in server/services/stats.js
• Display them on the admin panel by editing client/views/admin/stats/

Email Templates

To customize the verification and confirmation emails for your event, put your new email templates in server/templates/ and edit server/services/email.js

Contributing

Contributions to Quill are welcome and appreciated! Please take a look at CONTRIBUTING.md first.

Feedback / Questions

If you have any questions about this software, please contact quill@hackmit.org.

License

Copyright (c) 2015-2016 Edwin Zhang (https://github.com/ehzhang). Released under AGPLv3. See LICENSE.txt for details.