Discussion: Drupal

New Mexico Orienteers' website is in Drupal, and we are contemplating online registration. Are any other clubs using Drupal? Which clubs do you think have good online registration?

Although my own club website isn't in Drupal, I am considering changing it to Drupal as it's what I develop with at work.
I know SOC (in the UK) use it: http://www.southampton-orienteers.org.uk/welcome
but don't have online registration, they might have considered it though.
I'm in the process of writing an event organisation system (although not for orienteering) in Drupal at work and would be happy to offer advice as I have researched the topic, feel free to get in touch..

Not by coincidence, both the (new) QOC and the (even newer) Orienteering USA websites are Drupal based.

As mentioned by lead developer Dan F. here, we are happy to share ideas and make code available to other O'clubs.

Regarding registration for local meets, while we (QOC) are thinking about it, it's hard to justify developing it from scratch on our own and if it's disconnected from a national or even local e-punch (and membership) database. That might change if and when Orienteering USA chooses to support a solution applicable to A-, B- and C-meets, especially if it's Drupal based (at least for us).

If well written, online registration would be an "add on" tool, just like others. We use a tool called Simplenews to manage e-newsletter subscriber lists and publishing the newsletter to those subscribers.

At this point I see no clear consensus what online registration should look like, so making it connected between clubs would seem premature. But, we could develop and share some online registration tools, and see which ones we like. Once that matures, we would be in a position to develop connectivity.

There is sort of a consensus, just about everyone in the U.S. uses O-signup now for A meet registration. Other national Federations have countrywide systems.

We (Get Lost!!) just developed an in-house system (no Drupal, lots of plain text editing and primitive formatting) to register teams because we couldn't find anything that was already done and would be able to handle teams as well as individuals, with the capabilities of adding/editing/removing participants, registering members at once or separately, and splitting the bill. Had I known how much work it would be, we wouldn't have started but now it's done (will be released to the public just in time for Henry Coe rogaine).

As we were doing it, we kept wondering why/how come Kenny hasn't built a system to run on top of AttackPoint yet...

Kent's system is great and we've used it plenty of of times, but my understanding - correct if wrong! - is that he's not interested in spending that much time developing or customizing it further or writing extensions (or APIs) to talk with a national epunch database and/or membership database. Nor is it well suited for local meets with lots of first-timers, Boy Scouts, teams, school groups, families, etc.

For some non-A meets (example: our recent MTBO), we've also used Active.com, and recently thought about switching to imathlete. It's way easier on a club's IT volunteers! But they have limitations too.

Is there good data on the costs (staff + $) and benefits of independent vs integrated national epunch +/- membership +/- national & local registration systems? Or perhaps even subjective opinions?

Nor is it well suited for local meets with lots of first-timers, Boy Scouts, teams, school groups, families, etc.

... but these aren't the customers, few of them will feel obligated to go online in advance and sign up for an activity they don't comprehend that well.

Active can almost handle teams. Not quite the feature set we needed, and expensive. If all your club needs is individual registrations, and can afford their fees, they are quite acceptable—and have been around for almost a decade. But they will own your participants' personal data, and feel free to spam them unless they opt out.

I've had good success with Active in registering teams, for rogaines. But the whole team needs to be registered and paid for at once, so there is no way that I know of to let team members register and pay individually. I know that is a negative.

Speaking from the registrar's standpoint, it was well worth it for our club to absorb the entire Active transaction fee, resulting in no financial impact to the participants (compared to registering by mail).

(I know there are lots of alternatives to Active, which I haven't researched; I'm not touting Active over other alternatives, just mentioning that it's worked OK for us.)

Active's cost should be mentioned: it's 6.75% + $1.25 per registration, but the kicker is that they have a $3.25 minimum processing fee per registration, so it can take away a very high % of a typical local entry fee, especially from junior, student and discounted registration categories.

I agree that it used to be the case that going online and registering was a barrier to getting newcomers, but I'm not sure that's true anymore. They've all been online at our website before they ever show up at an event.

One other thought: with the right system - a free one - a "courtesy preregistration", in which you register online for a course without paying or really committing yourself, can also help a club since it predicts the number of maps to print, and allows the participant's name, epunch #, and other details to be entered before the event, among other benefits.

Regarding "courtesy preregistration": our club has used a GoogleDocs spreadsheet with the built-in form option to do this. It's a really, ridiculously easy way to set up a basic registration system and it works quite well for our local meets.

great idea!

Definitely, the Active fee structure makes it basically unusable (or at least highly impractical) for typical local meet fees.

@Cristina: can I see this online? What is involved?

There are loads of forms products on the web - the basic idea is that you build a form by dragging/dropping fields onto a screen and then publishing it on the web or embedding it into your website. Each form submission generates a new row in a spreadsheet which you download and import into your event's sportident software.

Do a web search for "online form" and you'll see dozens of options, google docs being one of many.

I am running an experimental form for an event my club is running this weekend. This is live now: http://www.formstack.com/forms/ajax-checkin
In Ireland we only use mandatory pre-entry and pre-payment for championship events. All other events are "entry on the day". This form is an attempt to get competitors to "check-in" beforehand so that they are automatically pre-loaded into the software, thus reducing data-entry work for the laptop operator at the event. If this is a success then I might look at implementing online payment and paperless check-in (i.e. send the competitor a check-in confirmation text message rather than asking them to print an email).

I would like to allow the competitor to return and edit/delete their entry but I haven't found a simple way of doing that yet. I would also like to be able to attach a PDF file to a confirmation email - this also seems to be a rare feature, probably because it could be abused on a free service.

Hope that helps...

We don't have any currently going, but you can see a basic example. You need a GoogleDocs account and then use is to create a new Form. Creating a form is easy, just click and type. Various input options are available, though it is not fully customizable.

The responses are collected in a spreadsheet. We don't make the entire spreadsheet viewable - if you want to get fancy you can have another sheet that grabs just the names and courses (no contact info) and publish that sheet to create a "Who's Coming" list.

There is also www.zone4.ca

Many nordic skiing events and clubs in Canada use this for online registration and results, and it looks like some orienteering clubs as well (including GHO).

People from there might be able to comment. I have no idea how much it costs.

I use Google Docs for the MoboGoGlobo! registration, too.

A lot of clubs in Japan use something similar to GoogleDocs, with a high degree of success for local meets. The meet director usually just had a spreadsheet with the pre-registered names and amplifying information available to check off as people checked in. Since almost no-one brings their own e-punch cards (both SI and Emit are used, so it generally wasn't worth the hassle to register your # with every club in the area), it allowed for easy pre-assignment of card #'s, ensuring the proper number of maps were printed, and (as an added bonus) sometimes they even had tags to claim your clothing from the clothing drop-off! Very efficient!

Hi,

I suggest you take a look at the http://www.orienteeringonline.net

It's pretty advanced site for online entries for orienteering events.
It's totally free, and if there is some feature that you would need and is currently missing, just email me and we can talk about. Also if you need some API for integration with your website / federation I am willing to add that too. Of course, it depends a bit on how much work it is, and how many people would benefit from the added feature.

Take a look here for supported features and some screenshots:
http://www.orienteeringonline.net/Help/FaqForOrgan...

Regards
Goran Nagy