While we were all at UDS in Budapest last month there was a great session about the LoCo Directory. Toward the end of the session I piped up to ask about time zones.
Time zones have always been a tricky problem for the directory, since some teams cover multiple time zones the first solution to this problem was to set a time zone per venue the team created. This worked well until when they added the Meetings functionality there was no “venue” to speak of so no time zone could be set. This meant that all “Meeting” events showed up in UTC time, which for a team like mine in California meant that not only would it not be our local time, our 7PM meetings would appear to be happening on the next day if you didn’t look carefully to notice that it was UTC. This made them very difficult for us to use, so we never did.
To solve this the team ended up creating a “Default Timezone” section to the administrative interface for the team.
Now when you create a Meeting it will default to “Team Default” but you’re also able to select any time zone. Awesome! Huge thanks to Michael Hall (mhall119) for making this a reality!
Now I may have headlined with time zones, but that’s not the only big change with the 0.3.4 release of the LoCo Directory.
When you’re logged in there is now have a “My Teams” link at the top of the directory that you can click on to quickly access upcoming events and meetings, pictures and links for your team.
Thanks to Ronnie for making this happen!
The next great change is courtesy of Chris Johnston (cjohnston). Having an event on IRC that isn’t a meeting? You can now select an “Event Channel” as a location for a virtual event that takes place in your IRC channel.
Thanks Chris!
Finally we have a contribution from Martin Owens (doctormo) which puts all venues you have used in the past at the top of list of venues to select so you don’t need to scroll through dozens of venues from all over the world to find that same venue you used for a release party last year.
Thanks Martin!
The LoCo Directory has to be one of my favorite web projects the community is working on right now, they’re a friendly team who are responsive to bug reports and always willing to help new contributors to get started.
So have questions? Comments? Bugs? Want to help out?
Check out the project launchpad page here: https://launchpad.net/loco-directory
Review status of and submit bugs here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/loco-directory
Talk to them on the Community-Web-Projects mailing list here: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/community-web-projects
Or drop by #ubuntu-website on chat.freenode.net to chat to them on IRC.
Originally posted here by Elizabeth Krumbach on 30 June 2011