Bicycle Club Web sites

[fkelly]

My bike club, Mohawk Hudson Cycling club in Albany NY area, is reviewing options for its web site, currently:

https://www.mohawkhudsoncyclingclub.org/

The main components of it are a ride/event calendar and membership system. We also carry information about rules for our rides, insurance coverage and other topics. We have news articles that users can add, but it happens rarely. The interface for that is a bit clunky. We have Forums that no one uses either.

Quite a bit of more topical (shorter lived) info is posted on our Facebook groups page.

Ride leaders (once approved) can post their own rides and after ride reports and/or have the rides posted by ride coordinators. The system has quite a sophisticated (and some might say over-complicated) privilege system where rights to do certain actions can be assigned to individual members.

The site is maintained in a content management system called Drupal (Version7) by a local consultant firm. One of our members acts as the site administrator and contacts the consultant when technical changes or enhancements are needed.

Long and short: Drupal 7 is going unsupported in a year or so and we either have to update (no simple task) or find alternatives.

We've looked at software such as Wild Apricot and a web site run by a club that has 17k members. Not sure we can go either route within our budget. We almost certainly can't hire a bunch of $100 an hour programmers to write something from scratch.

So, I am looking for alternatives. Does your bicycle club have a good web site? Can it process memberships (we have 600 to 700 members and accept payments through Paypal)? Do you have a ride calendar you like? Is it easily maintained? Do you have smartphone apps that work together with your web site? How did you get these done?

Links and recommendations welcome. TIA

[josephr]

when my daughter decided to go to Purdue, someone here suggested contacting the Wabash River Cycle Club to help me find some routes...they recently re-did their website and for a small club, I find their website to be awesome.

https://wrcc-in.org/

[rnhood]

Racereach (https://racereach.com/) can build you a site, and offer many other things.

Our club's website (https://raleighgyros.com/) was built by RaceReach.

Cost is very reasonable, if anything. They just get a cut out of member and event registrations, and club store sales.

[bikinchris]

The best bicycle club website I have seen is
https://www.cascade.org/

[jwalther]

Ours is nothing fancy, but it serves its purpose. Club Express has worked well for us. https://www.bgcycling.net/content.aspx?page_id=0&club_id=740127

[palincss]

My bike club, Mohawk Hudson Cycling club in Albany NY area, is reviewing options for its web site, currently:

https://www.mohawkhudsoncyclingclub.org/

The main components of it are a ride/event calendar and membership system. We also carry information about rules for our rides, insurance coverage and other topics. We have news articles that users can add, but it happens rarely. The interface for that is a bit clunky. We have Forums that no one uses either.

Quite a bit of more topical (shorter lived) info is posted on our Facebook groups page.

Ride leaders (once approved) can post their own rides and after ride reports and/or have the rides posted by ride coordinators. The system has quite a sophisticated (and some might say over-complicated) privilege system where rights to do certain actions can be assigned to individual members.

The site is maintained in a content management system called Drupal (Version7) by a local consultant firm. One of our members acts as the site administrator and contacts the consultant when technical changes or enhancements are needed.

Long and short: Drupal 7 is going unsupported in a year or so and we either have to update (no simple task) or find alternatives.

We've looked at software such as Wild Apricot and a web site run by a club that has 17k members. Not sure we can go either route within our budget. We almost certainly can't hire a bunch of $100 an hour programmers to write something from scratch.

So, I am looking for alternatives. Does your bicycle club have a good web site? Can it process memberships (we have 600 to 700 members and accept payments through Paypal)? Do you have a ride calendar you like? Is it easily maintained? Do you have smartphone apps that work together with your web site? How did you get these done?

Links and recommendations welcome. TIA

Oxon Hill (Southern MD) uses Wild Apricot. It' about the same size as yours. We use a locally written PHP application for the ride schedule. We also have a club Ride With GPS account.

[HenryA]

Have you seen this?

https://www.drupal.org/about/9/migrate-7-to-8-to-9

Seems like anyone in the website maintenance business would have this figured out so it did not kill off their customers.

Also, 7 is not going unsupported until 2021. And even if unsupported, would it matter unless you needed some new feature not found in 7?

[cnighbor1]

Here is my club, Grizzly Peak Cyclists Berkeley California
My guess is done by tech member

https://www.grizz.org/home/index.php

[speedevil]

Also, 7 is not going unsupported until 2021. And even if unsupported, would it matter unless you needed some new feature not found in 7?

Short answer: yes. Updates to software packages frequently (almost always) include patches to address security issues that are reported. Websites that run on older versions of software are frequently targeted by malicious people, and part of what makes this simpler is that software changelogs list the problems and patches. So if your site is running an older codebase, the hackers know exactly which exploits have not been patched.

It is a race between nefarious people and software developers.

[Peter B]

SEBC is local to me. Basic but functional for member's stated needs. We refreshed about 10 years ago. Surfing around tonight I see there's opportunity to improve in a few areas.

https://www.sierraexpress.org/

Know the audience, choose your content, manage to your budget. Lots of options out there.

[eddief]

not sure the website is great, but the club is a damn good one.

a couple hundred folks did New Year's Day ride and then were treated to catered brunch.

https://srcc.wildapricot.org/

[fkelly]

Have you seen this?

https://www.drupal.org/about/9/migrate-7-to-8-to-9

Seems like anyone in the website maintenance business would have this figured out so it did not kill off their customers.

Also, 7 is not going unsupported until 2021. And even if unsupported, would it matter unless you needed some new feature not found in 7?

Speedevil wrote most of my response. Whenever Drupal "unsupports" Drupal 7 it will be a security exposure to keep using it. And many of the security problems have little to do with Drupal code itself. There was just a security "patch" to Drupal 7 this December (2019) relating to so-called "third party" code libraries. When those patches stop being written you don't want to be using the product any more.

Just as important, our Drupal 7 web site is 7 years old. It's showing its age and we get many comments about the need to update the look. If we're going to do that, it just makes sense to do it on a newer version of Drupal. The theming (controls the appearance) of Drupal 8 and successors coming this Summer is very different than that in Drupal 7. It makes no sense to us to spend a lot of time revising the Drupal 7 site at this point. And we're not committed totally to staying with Drupal (any version) in any event. That's what this exploration is about: looking at options.

Thanks to everyone who has commented so far. One of our committee members has a spreadsheet with bike club web site links nationwide. I wasn't aware of it until 2 days ago ... we'll be using it and (with his permission) I will put it up on a web site in the next week or two as time permits as well as a summary of what I've found from the links and recommendations you all are posting.

[redir]

Just migrate to Drupal 8. Probably the easiest thing to do.

[fkelly]

Just migrate to Drupal 8. Probably the easiest thing to do.

You might be right. We are having a meeting with our consultant Saturday to discuss this. But nothing about Drupal is "easy". I'm pretty sure that we are using some Drupal 7 "modules" that don't have Drupal 8 equivalents. So there may be some conversion as opposed to migration steps.

And we are getting strong feedback that we need to make the site "smartphone enabled". Drupal natively does a pretty good job with this but viewing the web site through a browser, no matter how good a job the web site software does, is not as good as having a native IOS or Android app.

[redir]

You might be right. We are having a meeting with our consultant Saturday to discuss this. But nothing about Drupal is "easy". I'm pretty sure that we are using some Drupal 7 "modules" that don't have Drupal 8 equivalents. So there may be some conversion as opposed to migration steps.

And we are getting strong feedback that we need to make the site "smartphone enabled". Drupal natively does a pretty good job with this but viewing the web site through a browser, no matter how good a job the web site software does, is not as good as having a native IOS or Android app.

My personal take on that is, I hate apps. I would rather just create a website with a responsive design with 'app' capabilities that anyone on any device can use and not just iOS or Android. Of course there are exceptions where apps are beneficial. But anyway...

Yes true you very well may have some modules that might not port to 8 well but most of the really popular ones, at least the ones I have used in the past, do.

Only one of my sites is Drupal 8 so I am no expert but you are right in that it's not easy, at least at first. Drupal has what I call the "drupal way' of doing things but once you get up to speed it's fairly easy to maintain a site. And since you are already on 7 you are at least somewhat familiar with the ecosystem. Though 8 is a big change.

Your current site looks ok to me on Android. Could be better but it's not bad imho.

[henrypretz]

Our club uses Wild Apricot and I think that we have been generally pleased. We also do a great deal through Facebook groups, but that gets wacky, convoluted, and unorganized much of the time. The WA platform enables us to do memberships, event pages, newsletter, registrations and the like. We have a dedicated newsletter editor, and an IT director who oversees all things digital. Both are volunteers who stepped up to help. The club has roughly 800 members.
I help direct one of our events part of which is doing the event page and registrations. I can attest that WA is simple enough for even me (a cave man) to work with, yet comprehensive enough to do some pretty complicated things that I would have no idea on how to do. I don't know what level of WA we use or pay for.

https://fresnocycling.com/

[fkelly]

@redir
Thanks for the feedback. I wrote our Bikeclub's original web site and packaged it into a now mostly defunct CMS in the early 2000's. I retired from it except to act as backup in 2012. We have a consultant who uses a International based web server company who handles the technical part. One of our club members handles day to day admin tasks ... not including software updates.

The implication: we are not even sure which exact modules he uses. I think that some of the workbench stuff may not have a Drupal 8 equivalent and I know that the theme we use will have to be replaced.

I run my own Drupal 8 site for myself and my wife's Sculpture business. No one else can get a userid on there so I don't have to deal with hackers and spammers. After nearly 10 years of dealing with those idiots on the bike club web site I was delighted to get out of that business.

I think RidewithGPS is a good example of a web site that has taken the app approach to supplement their "official" web site. They started out focused on key line of business needs: letting users download routes that they could then use for turn by turn instructions during rides. It's a different design from the web site. They've expanded recently to let you create and edit routes using the app. I cringe at the expansion: I can't imagine trying to create a route on a smartphone. But the basic app itself works well and has a different smartphone centric design.

Yeah, our bike club site works pretty well on a smartphone. But not, in my opinion as good as an app could. I don't think we should have to pay a fortune to get an app built ... we'd basically be extracting data from our database and formatting in the app's calendaring software. But that's what our investigations is all about ... to be determined.