1 Introduction

Small research groups rarely fit the hosted-conference product market. Their needs are idiosyncratic, their budgets thin, and their tolerance for vendor lock-in low. The alternative—building from scratch for each event—repeats the same work every year.

Our answer is a template, not a product: one Django codebase in which every venue-specific fact lives in a single configuration file.

2 Design

The system separates three concerns:

1. Configuration. Name, dates, tracks, rooms, deadlines.

2. Content. Submissions, reviews, decisions.

3. Presentation. Templates and a house stylesheet.

Table 1 summarises the operational burden we measured over the last three events.

3 A Note on Rendering

Papers are stored as LaTeX and rendered to PDF, HTML, and markdown from the same source. The render quality of inline mathematics such as T_{\text{setup}} = \alpha \cdot c_{\text{venues}} + \beta matters as much in a browser as on paper, which is why the house style ships three implementations of one visual language.

4 Conclusion

Configurable single-template systems are viable for small fleets. The discipline that matters is not technical: it is the willingness to say no to hardcoded venue details.