Is there a list of the variables that are accessible through the Liquid engine that I'm overlooking? Without one, I'm unable to do much with Liquid. Thanks!

We’ve been collecting answers to questions, how-to advice and tips for making the most of CrowdVine….and, behold: documentation that reveals the inner awesomeness of CrowdVine, the secret sauce of community management, the cookbook to solve all of your problems! (Well, most of them….) The first is our CrowdVine User Manual. This is for members of [...]

How do you create a great website design that is attractive, usable, and converts visitors to attendees? Lets look at how some other successful conferences manage that. This is part two, in our Conference Websites Basics series. #1. Clean and Clear Less is more in conference website design. You want your message to be read, [...]

I have been able to customize the mobile site for my conference a little bit (added header and footer image) but am wondering if there is a decent tutorial for further customization (styleing fonts, changing colors etc.) Thanks Eric

I want to add users from the admin side, so i can pre-fill in some of their information. Is there a way to do this that i am not seeing. Thanks Eric

CrowdVine Professional Service clients can send us an Excel spreadsheet of their session data to import. Here are the main fields we look for when we import session data; you want each field to be a column in your Excel spreadsheet: session title date start time end time speaker names (separated by commas) session description track tags (separated by commas) The actual column titles we look for are: title,description,start,end,day,tags,track,spea... [read more]

Terrie Schweitzer: I'm attaching an example spreadsheet here that shows how a file should look.

As we get into hosting complete conference websites on CrowdVine, we want to start publishing on best practices for conference website design. This is article #1. Our philosophy is that the entire conference revolves around the attendee. Happy attendees let you make happy sponsors which lets you make a profit. That’s reflected in our design [...]

There are two places in CrowdVine where social media content comes into the site. One is in the overall site feeds area, under Admin --> Feeds. This is where you can enter a blog RSS feed, conference or company twitter account, a photo feed, a site tag. The site tag is sometimes also called a "hash tag", but if your hash tag is, for example, #confstuff, you'd just enter confstuff here. This will pull in tweets from all over twitter with that hash... [read more]

Please, i need my "site" in Spanish, And I can't change It.

Terrie Schweitzer: Hi Marcos - We have info for that is here: http://support.crowdvine.com/posts/5530194 Good luck! Regards, Terrie

Big thanks to Mike McAllen for having me on the 164th episode of the Meetings Podcast. You can listen to it live right here (turn your speakers on so your coworkers can hear): Meetings Podcast Episode 164 with Tony Stubblebine of CrowdVine Was it a controversial episode? You bet. I predicted the demise of exhibition [...]

Try as I might, I can't seem to figure out how to get the "Welcome Message" on our Crowdvine integrations (there are 3) into the RH column. I've seen it on several crowdvine sites (including this one) - and I've looked through all of the sections for customization and could not find a place that seemed apt to do so. Any suggestions

Terrie Schweitzer: Hi Krys - That used to be on the right column in old implementations of CrowdVine, but it was changed in the more recent installs. Unfortunately, it's not a configurable option to change it back...that's why you aren't finding a way to do it. Regards... [read more]

Krys Freeman: Hi Terrie, Nice to chat with you again. Is this purposely "not a configurable option?" Is there a way that I can override this in the CSS? -Krys

Terrie Schweitzer: Hi Krys - I think it would be pretty difficult to manage with the CSS only. There is an optional third column in the templates that you can enable. You need to add the CSS to place it, and then it creates another column on each page. Regards, Terrie

We’re letting more people into the beta for managing the entire conference website. Our goal for these websites is to have simple defaults that are clear and engaging from the attendee perspective, but flexible when the conference organizer needs it. But what does that mean concretely? Below is the basic feature list. If you want [...]

CrowdVine is now available as a 30 day trial, no fees or downloads required. That means you can test things out before making any sort of commitment, and more importantly, you can see what event community software looks like without ever having to talk to a sales person. Start a free trial now. This is [...]

The best way to get people to join your network is by email. Announcing the network in a blog post or by Twitter just isn't as effective. Fortunately, there are tools to help you send invitations. If you have a list of email addresses, just Admin → Invite members and simply enter them in the box provided. Add a personal note if you like. Click "invite" and the invitations will be emailed for you. Here's what the invitation email looks like: Hi, {... [read more]

Every CrowdVine network comes with a standard set of profile questions to start with, and then you can add your own. The questions that come with every network are: * Name * Location (city, state/province, and/or country) * Homepage URL * Profile Photo * Tell us a little about yourself These answers get carried over from one network to another (see this post for more about that). You also get to ask custom questions. It's best to choose questions... [read more]

What is the number one change that would benefit conferences and events? I think about this question all of the time. Awhile back, I posed some questions about things I didn’t get about the event industry. Why were industry suppliers so fragmented? Why were things so expensive? Why are so many conferences reinventing the wheel? [...]

At the beginning of September, we put together a mockup of a new background for our Twitter account. Like a lot of Twitter backgrounds, it had an explanation of who we were and some calls to action. But before we had a chance to add it to our account, Twitter changed their design. Here was [...]

Is there any way to do this? I'd like to have a Register link to an eventbrite page, rather than as something in the navigation.

Terrie Schweitzer: Hi Gerry - The easiest way to do this would be to go into Admin --> Basic and add your HTML to the Welcome message. Regards, Terrie

Gerry Kirk: Hi Terrie, what I want is to change content in the sidebar - any way to do this? The Welcome message only shows on the main page.

Terrie Schweitzer: Hi Gerry - I think the best way to do that would be to use the optional third column component. There's some discussion of that on this blog post: http://blog.crowdvine.com/2010/09/18/conference-design-customization-checklist/ You'll need to add a DI... [read more]

There isn't a way to tag discussion topics, but be able to replicate something like it with clever selection of your profile tags. The terms in the tag clouds that appear on your home page link to pages of their own. On that page, you'll see the users who have included that tag on their profile on the left. On the right, you'll see the discussion posts by those users. By asking a profile question related to discussions your users are likely to ha... [read more]

Gerry Kirk: Yes, that would be a nice feature, to tag discussions directly.

Terrie Schweitzer: Thanks, Gerry! We appreciate getting a better feel for what people want.

Many self-service conferences are doing design customizations that are amazingly beautiful and thorough. We love that! Design customizations are one of the main services we provide in our support packages, but the tools we use are the exact same tools you get from our self-service packages. So doing a design customizations is just a matter [...]

Update: Sign up for early access to our beta program. We’re doing customer trials where CrowdVine is hosting the entire conference website, rather than just being a social network and agenda builder add-on. Is this a change in direction? No. But it does qualify as a major new feature. Our original goal was to make [...]

CrowdVine’s mobile version is now customizable via the “Customize our default templates” link in the Admin panel of your network. This gives you the ability to brand the mobile version with your own design touches. Compare UX Week‘s customized version this year with the generic version from their previous conference: If network members are logged [...]

As usual, blogging slows down for us when we’re busy. I wish this weren’t true. I’d be happy if my job was almost entirely researching and publishing conference and social media information, but we’re not there yet. Our work life used to be, “Blog, serve customers, write code: pick one.” Now that we’re bigger, we [...]

If your attendees have been members of CrowdVine before (perhaps via your previous conference), their basic information is pre-filled for them when they join and edit their profile on your network. Attached is a screen shot showing what our defaults are. All of the questions on the left side, "Basic Info", are built in to all CrowdVine netwworks. This is information that carries through for users as they join new networks (but they always have th... [read more]

Is there, or will there be soon, an ability to add your own favicon to a crowdvine custom site? When modifying the default templates, I discoverd that the icon we can add, appends itself to blogs, or other feed posts connected with the site management. What I'd hoped is that this would also be applied to the icon typically associated with a website - as listed in the browser. I have been searching all morning to find a way to modify the template ... [read more]

Terrie Schweitzer: Hi Krys - Unfortunately, we don't support custom favicons with CrowdVine. Sorry we're not able to provide that for you at this time! Regards, Terrie

I hear a lot of good things about CrowdVine customer support, and because I’m the forward-facing side of that, I get lots of nice kudos about it. But the truth is, there’s a lot more to support than the person the customer talks to. I started out in tech support for WordStar in 1989, and [...]

Like a lot of venues, the San Francisco Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is running a promotion offering $5 off your ticket if you check-in on FourSquare. It seems so easy and like such a good idea. The promotion is essentially a discount for customers who promote the venue or event. This is [...]

Question. We're having some problems with our site (www.globalwa.org) not showing up in google. The crowdvine subdomain (connect.globalwa.org) is showing up instead. Is there any possibility that the subdomain is interfering with the google listing? I've submitted a reconsideration request to Google to no avail. Please let me know if you have experienced similar issues. Thanks.

Tony Stubblebine: Eric, We often have good google rankings, but we're not going to force your main site out of the Google index altogether. I did a search for "convene strengthen advocate" a phrase that appears on the main site, but not on your network, and the main s... [read more]

Eric Becker: Tony-- thanks for the reply and links. I submitted a reconsideration request to google over a month ago. I also submitted the site to their crawlers to make sure it's being seen. But neither of these seemed to work. Its bizarre-- the site shows up in... [read more]

EventVue, maker of event social networks and our first competitor, just announced that they are shutting down their business. They’ve posted a raw and honest post mortem. This is bad for the event industry. They blame themselves, but I blame venture capital. Respect for innovation EventVue built a good product. Whenever I talked to one [...]