OpenImpetus

Welcome to the OpenImpetus homepage!

``OpenTelemark is competition planning software that is bound to be the lifesaver and best friend (and worst enemy) of every competition organizer. It automates every aspect of registration from registration to assigning numbers, blah blah blah'' -- Michael Posner, offering an introductory paragraph for this page.

OpenImpetus is a ballroom dance competition web registration software package written in perl5. After entering their personal data (name, email address, and school), couples will be able to add and/or drop events. Any update will immediately appear in the HTML listings (by competitor, by school, by dance). Later, the site administrator can prompt OpenImpetus to output the collected data for printing in a programme and for handing out to the scrutineer, the emcee, and attending school captains.

OpenImpetus handles HTTP requests and then returns HTML pages (and sometimes generates HTML and Postscript files). Data integrity is maintained via a database logfile. The site webmaster can configure the exact look of the pages by specifying a BODY tag; other pages will be customizable by the site webmaster.

Latest News

29 Jan 2000
Working on v0.9.7.1 now; OI should now support multiple comps running on a single (Server) process. Now to test. :)

I'm assembling a small team of programmers at MIT to work on the rest of the bugs and RFEs With some luck, v1.0 will be out soon.

I'm also looking for a successor to take on this project for me. If you're interested, let me know.

Installing/Using OpenImpetus

OpenImpetus is shareware: anyone will be able to use it for free, provided they add the line

<a href="http://www.mit.edu/~dcltdw/OpenImpetus"><b>OpenImpetus</b></a> competition web registration software written by David Leung. Copyright 1999 David Leung. All Rights Reserved.

The latest draft of the Installation Guide is for version v0.9.6.4R.

Development Plans

• Basic functionality: adding and dropping of events.
• Simple site configuration via modification to one file.
• Seamless handling of both single-dance and multi-dance events.
• Simple email address validity checking.
• Easy to internationalize with all constants appearing in one location.
• Database integrity checks that prevent competitors from registering in the same dance with multiple people.
• Recognizes 'de', 'von', and 'van' in names and appropriately decapitalizes them.
• A separate site configuration file, so as to allow on-the-fly reconfiguration.
• An internal flag that states which competition this HTTP request is associated with. This allows a single httpd to serve multiple competitions by reading/writing from multiple sets of files.
• Handles TBAs -- users can specify that a partner is TBA and will be able to specify that information later. Also, the site manager can configure OpenImpetus to not accept TBA entries.
• Multiple HTML and Postscript output formats: listing of competitors sorted by name, sorted by school by name, sorted by dance by name, sorted by dance by school by name, and a listing of the number of entries in each event. Additionally, a Postscript output of competitors by school by name suitable for tracking fees at Registration.
• A PostScript listing by school, sorted by name, including number, partners and registered dances, to be given to team captains. (Currently only has number and name).
• New stats pages: pages are subdivided. Category-by-foo is now divided by category; by school is by school, and by name is by first letter of last name. Stats-by-leader has been changed to stats-by-name.
• Number generation. Automatically assigning numbers to competitors based on distributing couples from the same school across the least significant digit.
• New command line options: -v|--version prints current version; -h|--help for usage information.
• Email verification of all changes (mail is sent to the couple whenever a change is made).
• Administrator homepage: a single page for the administrator to redo stats, to mail all competitors (listing their current entry and including an arbitrary message written by the site maintainer, usually reminding competitors that the deadline is approaching), to have automatic number assignment executed, to generate the postscript output, to open or close registration, or to scrub the database (makes for faster access).
• New stats page: Everyone -- By Last Name listing.
• Users can jump to the registration page for a couple from a given stats page.
• On the stats form, there are ways to restrict output to one school.

Features hopefully to be included in v1.0:

• A perl script that does a step-by-step site configuration.
• A way to manually enter numbers.

Features that could be interesting to add to way-in-the-future versions of OpenImpetus:

• Massive hyperlinking: this'll allow a lot of chaos -- but that way, if you're looking at an event abbreviation, you could click on it and get the stats-by-single-event listing for it, or if you look at a name, you could get stats-by-single-name or stats-by-couple.
• A listing of competitors sorted by phase of moon of when they were received.
• Cost per dance and tallying of costs. Right now, the software doesn't know that this all costs money. :)
• Passwords. Right now, the system is completely open to malicious attack. Either the user will be prompted to enter a password for a given couple, or a given couple will be provided a password. (Probably the first; the latter seems unnecessary obtuse.)
• Payment via credit card and the security surrounding that. I believe there are already freeware packages that enable this; this needs a lot more investigation.
• Stats form: add abbreviations for dance names, thereby allowing it to fit within 80 columns.

Known Bugs and RFEs

Credits