Building a Rowing Club availability / sign-up website

[carcrashdisco]

Hi there,

I have been asked by my rowing club to build a new website for them. I'm fine doing the design and the "basic" stuff in Dreamweaver (I'm using CS5) but I'm struggling to get my head around how to build the availability section.

What we need as a club is:

- An area where rowers can log in
- They can then update what dates and sessions they available to row on
- Administrators can log in and update what sessions are taking place and when (date / time)
- On a set cut-off point every week (say Wednesday night) the site then examines availability for the next week and fires off an email to certain people (e.g. coaches, captains etc) and let's them know exactly who is available at what time
- Even better would be for it to sort them into boats (such as an eight or a four) based on what side the rower can row on.

I can't even begin to get my head around this. Are there any Spry scripts that anyone knows of that would help out? Or is it simply a case of me manning up, sticking my head into a book about php or something similar and working out how to get such a database together?

Many thanks in advance for any advice you may be able to give me!

A humble rower from the UK

[edbr]

you are looking at a site with a lot of functionality, it will take study time and a lot. It would be a nice project but it depends on your commitment to learning i would say.
Log in and mailing may not be Too difficult to guide you through , but the code that dreamweaver outputs is pain to wade through. There is a log in tutorial on the site here which would be better to modify and develop i would say.

Re the calendar, have a look at google calendars. This might get yu covered in the mean time as there is a fair few options available. you can then show on your site using Iframe.
I was working on a site ( which has stalled while waiting on client data ) but might show you a possibility as i used a google calendar in the way i mentioned.

http://miltonkeynesmassagetherapy.com/calendar.php

[carcrashdisco]

Thanks for the response. I had thought about Google calendar but the problem we have is that most of us work for banks and therefore can't access Google calendar or docs etc due to firewall restrictions (behind the times I know).

I'll check out your site and your tips in the meantime though.

Thanks again

[edbr]

ok you might want to look at joomla , im not a huge fan but it might provide you with an answer

[edbr]

http://www.jevents.net/ might do the job

[domedia]

...
- Administrators can log in and update what sessions are taking place and when (date / time)
- On a set cut-off point every week (say Wednesday night) the site then examines availability for the next week and fires off an email to certain people (e.g. coaches, captains etc) and let's them know exactly who is available at what time
- Even better would be for it to sort them into boats (such as an eight or a four) based on what side the rower can row on.

This is going to require a lot of hacking. I don't think any CMS or canned plugin/extension to it is going to do this. This is a custom application that someone has to build.

[edbr]

yes you are right Dom, i should have stressed the calendar idea is a trade off to give you some function and the Joomla angle was to provide a membership site with mailing capabilities. It would be a trade off but might be workable.

[domedia]

It might be the only workable solution. Getting a custom app built might not be cheap.

[edbr]

i was wondering about the google block too, would a domain block also affect iframes? I suppose it could but had never thought about it before

[Johnknowsit]

Hi guys,

I've been rowing myself during almost 10 years and I think I understand how works a rowing club. From my point of view best solution for you is to create a booking system where you'll setup each boat as one product so the booking is made "per boat". There is another very interesting thing in having a booking system in a rowing club: With one click you will know who is on the water and it is very important in terms of security and insurance. For your booking calendar I would recommend you Webreserv, it is a booking system you can setup for almost any kind of reservation and it should work for rowing too. They may ask for a small fee depending an how many boats do you want to setup but it is very affordable still.

Here is the webpage: http://www.webreserv.eu

I hope that will help.