Info on NoBMoB and Global Riders

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raintonr's picture

Hi,

Following some discussion about the IMBA site move to Drupal where I brought this up, am posting here so more people can learn about this.

I'm hoping this won't be misconstrued as spam because it's partly about a site I built for an MTB group on Drupal, and partly about how this grew into a hosted application service where we are now offering the same model to other groups, clubs, etc.

You could either learn from this and go on to build you own site, or perhaps ask about joining the service.

It all started as a mailing list to let friends organise weekly rides. Then someone wanted a website. This started static HTML but then I came along, and being a nerd proposed a CMS, selected Drupal and started building. The site I'm talking about is www.NoBMoB.com - Northern Beaches Mountain Biking Group. This is build with Drupal using freely available modules, but also uses some 25 custom modules specifically to enhance site functions.

Some of the features:

  • Ride area guides. Trail guides for want of a better description. Eg: http://nobmob.com/rides/manlydam
  • Each area can contain many trails and we use the trackfield.module (which I happen to have written) to map out specific trails within each area. Eg: http://nobmob.com/node/12/tracks or on a map: http://nobmob.com/node/12/map
  • Trail updates for each area, so one can gauge trail conditions before heading out. These are in a block liberally sprinkled over the site, but full history is available. Eg: http://nobmob.com/node/12/status
  • We have a calendar for meetings and races. This can be linked to an area so the meeting spot it filled using AJAX.
  • After a meeting/race has occurred people can create an image gallery and post images about that, linked to the meeting.
  • Users can also blog about a meeting/race which is also linked. For race results this makes a nice ordered table on the original calendar entry.
  • If users choose to blog and include race results this builds into a nice history of their efforts via a tab on the account.

There's probably more, but you probably get the idea. This site is constantly evolving, I've been maintaining it for 4.5 years now.

Anyhow - so then I got to thinking... this has taken a lot of time and a massive amount of work, why limit it's use to the few thousand riders in our area. So I wrote a few more custom modules and began offering the same model to other clubs and groups under the www.Global-Riders.net banner. This is basically a Drupal multi-site service (doesn't use the usual domain.module though - I wrote my own, more specific one) where each site's admin is able to choose to share various content (some forums such as equipment discussion are applicable wherever you are located for example) with the network of sites, and also choose to have their own individual forums, trail areas, etc.

At the moment this service is currently free as it's hosted on my home/office server, but the idea is that with enough groups on-board, not needing to pay for their own hosting, we could all toss a few bucks in a pot each month and get a very nice dedicated server.

As I started by saying, hope this is useful for two audiences. If you'd like to talk more about the site, or the service happy to discuss either.

Cheers,

Rob

P.S. I also created the www.IMBA-AU.com site, although this doesn't run on the platform discussed above for various reasons.

Comments

Wow!

mattbk's picture

That's a great site you've put together there. I'm slowly working on my own sit along similar lines, although it will hopefully be a little more focused on dealing with race results and less focused on just cycling (the more the merrier, in terms of people in my area who like outdoor sports). Even though I'm not using your hosting service, your success is very inspirational. I hope you don't mind if I borrow a couple of your concepts.

No probs

raintonr's picture

Thanks for your feedback. Yeah, things are going pretty well with the site and partners.

When you say you'd like something focused on results, what are you thinking? Our events (calendar entries that are marked as such) allow users to log their results when they blog about the event which builds into a table. Not many users actually do this, guess they aren't competitive or don't like to talk about their race? ;)

Some examples...

http://nobmob.com/node/7867
http://nobmob.com/node/9560
http://nobmob.com/node/12104

If you are logged in, one can view results by specific users in a tab on their profile.

For more serious event use I have been toying with the idea of building an events module which could run offline at an event (copy of the site instance with posting disabled, running on Linux laptop or WAMP) and allow organisers to enter results in real time.

This would dump details into one or more tables which could be sync'd with the master system after the event (or while it's going if internet access is available). This could give event organisers a way to instantly publish results and link to the site users. It could also allow them to setup WiFi at their event and give anyone with laptop/smartphone the ability to view live results. For 8 or 24 our events which are popular here in Australia this would be awesome!

Well, it's just a thought. I don't suppose that would be too hard to setup either.

What sort of event/result requirements were you thinking of?

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