The launch of PSU Cycling’s next generation website is pretty cool for a number of reasons: a new design and re-branding of PSU Cycling, community-building features for members, officer tools, and a powerful and extensible back end. These add up to what PSU Cycling believes is the most powerful and awesomest website run by any collegiate cycling club in the country. The new site is just the beginnings of an amazing year for Portland’s biggest collegiate cycling club.
New Design:
The new site design is all about being focused and clean. This reflects recent subtle internal changes at PSU Cycling. In Spring and over the Summer members and officers re-examined their constitution and will vote on changes Tuesday Nov. 17th that aim to re-focus the club on the core of their mission. In the past, the group has been involved in almost everything related to bikes at PSU: members of PSU Cycling helped start projects such as the PSU Bike Co-Op, the PSU Bicycle Advocacy Collective, and got Millar Grant funding to help start a bike rental program [currently in the works]. After having a hand in starting every almost bike project at PSU, officers of PSU Cycling believe that the group can now focus a great deal more on recreational riding and competitive cycling, which have always been the heart and soul of the organization.
The tagline used by the site is ‘the cycling lifestyle’ and the new site aims to capture that. The lifestyle is twopart: activities and values. The activities are recreational and competitive cycling. The values are are socializing, friendship, camaraderie, mentoring new riders, community service, and having fun. Specifically, this means that the main weekly activities you’ll see on the events page will be recreational rides and team training, and PSU Cycling will be always looking to incorporate the values of the cycling lifestyle into those activities. The group will also continue to be involved in community service, especially where it relates to the cycling lifestyle, such as helping out the BTA. Over time, PSU Cycling will be adding photos to match the complete cycling lifestyle, but in the mean time many of the community related aspects are visible to members who log in.
Community Features:
A huge improvement over the previous static design is the ability for club members to have user accounts on the site. After the account is set up, basic profile information is displayed on the roster page. For members who log in, extended profile information for other members is available, which helps club members connect, and allows PSU Cycling to more quickly and easily involve new members. Other current member features include forums and profile integration with Flickr. More features in the works include Facebook and Twitter integration.
Officer Tools:
The new site includes tools to make PSU Cycling’s volunteer officers jobs easier. This is imperative for a club as large as PSU Cycling; last year, at 75+ members, it was one of the larger PSU student organizations. Administrative details about members such as if they’ve filled out paperwork for PSU are stored online and can be checked by officers. Over the year more tools will be added, such as printing a detailed roster, mailing list integration, and allowing members to sign up for events.
Powerful Backend:
PSU Cycling’s new site is powered by the Drupal content management system. Drupal also powers sites such as the main PSU website and Whitehouse.gov. As an open source system with thousands of user-contributed modules, extending the site with new features is easier than ever. psucycling.com version 2.0 was built on the latest Acquia Drupal distribution plus about 30 contributed modules, and uses the Acquia Slate theme. Peter W developed the site and is looking foward to continue to improve it to meet the needs of PSU Cycling.
