Features

The Congress System has the following features:

  • Congress organiser logs in to add a new congress. Specify late entry date, number of sections etc.
  • Congress participant fills in online form and selects themselves from the grading list (ECF or Chess Scotland)
  • Congress participant fills in online form to enter details and is directed to paypal to pay.
  • When participant has paid at paypal, this triggers his entry to appear on the list of entrants on the web site, it sends him a confirmation email and it sends a confirmation email to the congress organiser.
  • The congress organiser can log in and amend entries if necessary (e.g. late bye request)
  • The congress organiser can log in and manually add entries, e.g. postal.
  • The system automatically calculates an estimated FIDE rating from an ECF rating or vice versa if necessary.
  • The grading type of each section can be set to FIDE, ECF, or Chess Scotland.
  • The congress organiser can extract a list of entrants into XL which can be fed into Swiss Manager or Tournament Director or used with a word template to print pairing cards or wall charts.
  • A report is created adding up entries by section and accounting for paypal's cut for your treasurer. It also reports instances where the entrant has claimed to be an ECF Silver member but is not.
  • When someone enters a login id is automatically created for them. If they then request a password they can login so they don't need to specify their details each time, and can remove or add themselves to mailing lists.
  • Congress organiser can send a mass email to previous entrants of congresses in their organisation or entrants of a particular congress.

This web site has been created by using the Drupal content management system including a number of 3rd party and custom modules.  The chess specific functions are provided by custom modules written by Malcolm Peacock:

  • Congress  - which provides all the online entry forms and database objects and integrates to PayPal API module.
  • PayPal API - handles the paypal payment.
  • ECF Data - which provides an interface to the English Chess Federation grading and membership data
  • CS Data - which provides an interface to the Chess Scotland grading and membership data.
  • FIDE Data - which provides an interface to the FIDE ratings data.

It is currently hosted by Krystal Hosting on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) paid for by Malcolm Peacock. The reason for moving away from using a cheaper shared server was that it placed a limitation on the number of emails that could be sent, and some emails were blocked when the reputation of the mail server was damaged by other users sending SPAM. There is a donation button under each organisations settings if you would like to contribute. 

The congress organiser does not need to know any of these technical details.