PyCon Canada 2013 is using a mobile application system from EventMobi for the conference. Rather than importing data manually, we can make use of the Excel spreadsheet import functionality to do bulk uploads of data, once we've made the raw information available from the website.
This isn't exactly pretty code -- it's essentially 100% special cases, nasty hacks, and one-off stuff to match the way we're doing things this year. It's probably not very widely applicable, but the ideas and techniques are likely to be similar to what other users might need to do.
Run refresh.py, and upload the files found in the new out directory.
There are several parts of the code that are not particularly nice. You should be aware of these (and fixes for them would be very welcome):
In the components.speakers module, calling get_speakers has the
side-effect of creating a temporary directory, downloading speaker photos to
it, cropping them into squares, and zipping up the result. That's not exactly
what you'd expect, given that all the other information is returned as a data
structure.
In the components.schedule module, the date of a schedule slot is inferred
after everything else, based on the start field from the JSON API. Ideally,
the field should just be added to the data returned from the server.
To correlate speakers and their talks, we really should be getting speaker
IDs from the JSON API. Instead, we get their names, and later use the
speaker_names_to_ids function in components.schedule to match these names
up with the IDs from the speakers API. Similar stuff goes on for sponsors
and the schedule (sponsorship levels and talk tracks, respectively).
Fields that need to be present in the output spreadsheets but which are not
used are still included in the various FIELDS structures, albeit with a
conversion function that just returns None.
There's an unexpected dependency on Django. This is because we're using the
easy-thumbnails Django application to do speaker photo resizing. It's far
from ideal to have such a big dependency, but the code works well enough.
80% of the code for handling each type of data is a copy/paste job, with a few special cases and tweaks for each one.
Setting the value of OUTPUT_DIR is duplicated a few times across modules.
There are surely plenty more things that you'll consider dirty hacks too.
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