Floribama Riders

Known issues

The collage banner in the header currently gets obscured by the word Floribama. We're working on that.

The technology

"Drupal" (pronounced Droo-pul) platform. This is a free open source system that runs several major web sites and offers a lot of flexibility.

This will involve switching web hosts, but after comparing features with Community Server and DotNetNuke, I think it's best for the club.

Here's what we have accomplished thus far in Drupal.

Online registration

We can put our registration form completely online and use SSL to encrypt the data just like banks do. See http://fbr.onlineconcepts.com/user/register
(Note, you won't be able to access this page if you're already logged in.)

Paypal integration

A user can fill out a form on our site, specifying which track day options they would like. Then they click a PayPal button, and they're automatically on the PayPal site with all the right options filled in.

http://fbr.onlineconcepts.com/node/add/payment

Calendar/events

You'll notice Upcoming Events on the top right of every page throughout the site. This shows how much we have going on.

Membership list

See http://fbr.onlineconcepts.com/members. You need to log into the site to see this. There's another version at http://fbr.onlineconcepts.com/profile

Custom home page for members vs. new users

We can present different messages depending on whether someone is already registered on the site. Currently, I just provide a prominent link to the
signup form for new users, but we could expand this.

Forum

This is working. See http://fbr.onlineconcepts.com/forum  The general public has read-only access to two forums, and logged-in users can post to six
additional members-only forums.

I don't see an easy way of porting over the forums from the current Floribamariders.com site. We could ask a member to volunteer and grab the posts that hold content that's "evergreen" and useful in the future.

Pretty site

We're using a custom theme with a photo provided by Steve Leukanech, customized by Ryan Nelson. We can create banner images that rotate for each page load, but we're working on pulling together better images.

Technical nerdy stuff

Using the Drupal platform, I set up a process that automatically backs up the *files* and *database* each night. I'm currently storing 10 days' worth of backups. This gives us a lot of flexibility because if we screw something up with an upgrade, we can restore from a previous backup. We can also set up separate development and production areas easily.

Search engine

It's running. The content gets indexed once an hour.

-John "Ice" T