Case Study · Conference Portal
A conference that runs itself.
What It Handles
0h
admin hours it removes
0
emails it sends on its own
0
delegates it handles
0
records lost
At a Glance
- Client
- Shaikh Zayed Postgraduate Medical Institute and Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan Medical & Dental College, Lahore
- What it is
- A conference portal, delegate side and staff side
- Status
- Live, running now
- Delegates
- 287
- Abstracts
- 240
- Built with
- Next.js · TypeScript · Postgres
The portal is at ichper2026.com
Where the Mess Comes From
How a conference ends up running on spreadsheets.
A conference of this size is normally administered with email, a WhatsApp group, a few forms and a set of spreadsheets passed between organisers. Nobody chose that. Somebody made a spreadsheet to solve a problem, then a second one to reconcile the first, then started a group chat because the spreadsheets were not fast enough to answer a question during a meeting.
It fails in specific and fairly predictable ways, and the list below is those ways. Every one of them is ordinary. That is the point: none of it needed a heroic fix, it needed the manual step taking out.
Problem by Problem
Six things that kept going wrong.
Abstracts arrive as email attachments
Word documents land in a shared inbox and somebody has to collate them, chase the missing ones and forward each to reviewers. Author names and institutions come in as two text boxes the submitter has to keep matched up by hand.
What We Built
- ·Submissions are checked as they are typed, so nothing arrives malformed.
- ·Authors are a proper list you add to and reorder. The numbering writes itself.
- ·Because the system knows who the authors are, it can email them.
Review that isn't really blind
Reviewers can see the author's name and institution on the document in front of them, and they can see each other's scores. The first number anyone reads sets the anchor for everyone after.
What We Built
- ·Reviewers are sent the abstract without the author fields attached, so there is nothing to reveal.
- ·A colleague's marks stay hidden until you have submitted your own.
- ·Ranking uses the average, so an abstract more people happened to open does not win by volume.
Rules that lived in the browser
What a delegate owes depends on their institution, their referral code, accommodation and whether an abstract was accepted. Worked out by hand it comes out wrong; worked out in the browser it can be edited by the delegate.
What We Built
- ·One function in the database decides what is owed, and it is the only thing allowed to.
- ·Student status comes from the record, not from a checkbox anyone can tick.
- ·Payment proof stays a claim until a person has checked it. No pass is issued before that.
Posters come back the wrong size
Presenters make their own posters. They arrive at wildly different quality, and often at the wrong physical size, which nobody finds out until somebody is standing at a print counter.
What We Built
- ·The portal draws the poster, at exactly the size the venue prints.
- ·It checks the finished file before accepting it. Wrong size, refused.
- ·Oral presenters get slides and a rehearsal timer instead, chosen from the format their reviewers assigned.
Booking the last workshop seat
Workshops have a fixed number of places. Two delegates tap the last one at the same moment, both see a free seat, and both get it.
What We Built
- ·The seat count is held and checked in the database, so the second request waits its turn.
- ·It then fails honestly instead of overbooking a room.
- ·One booking per delegate, so a double tap or a stale tab cannot make a second.
Nobody can say how many have registered
How many people are coming? How many have paid? How many abstracts are still unreviewed? Every answer means interrupting someone, and two people reading two spreadsheets will give you two numbers.
What We Built
- ·One dashboard, updated as things happen, with a view for each role.
- ·The registration desk is search, then Enter to check somebody in, with an undo.
- ·Every list exports cleanly, without Excel mangling phone numbers or dropping leading zeros.
The Poster Builder
The part we are most pleased with.
Every accepted presenter needs a poster, and a poster is the one deliverable where being nearly right is worthless. Nearly the right size is a wasted print run, found out too late to fix. So the portal makes it for them.
It draws it for them
The presenter types their content into the portal and the poster appears as they go. No design software, no template to download, no guessing at margins.
Print-ready, not a picture
The file is vector, so it stays sharp at full wall size and stays small enough to store. A poster saved as an image would be over 50MB each.
The preview is the real file
What is on screen is the actual PDF, not a lookalike drawn a second way. What you see is what comes out of the printer.
Sized from the real thing
Type sizes were worked out from the physical panel each format hangs on, so text is readable at the distance people actually stand.
Limited on purpose
Four figures, either column, three sizes, sections you can switch off. No free dragging and no arbitrary type sizes, because those are what make a homemade poster look homemade.
It costs nothing to redo
Everything renders on the presenter's own device. They can regenerate it fifty times the night before and it costs the conference nothing.
A ready-made template sits alongside it for anyone who would rather design their own. The builder is meant to be the easy option, not the only one.