I’m about a 3rd of the way through the process of writing a new piece of software.
It will be called “RC Club Manager”. The plan is to make a tool which helps RC Racing Clubs create their website, manage their memberships and organise their championships and race meetings all in one place.
It will come in the form of a “plug-in” to a thing called “WordPress”. If you’ve never used WordPress, you will almost certainly have used a web site that is created with it. It is a piece of free software, that’s very easy to install, and automates creation of a website. Originally for blogging (a blog is a kind of online diary), it’s simplicity of installation and it’s easy customisation made it wildly popular for people who wanted a website without having to learn to code.
It’s been around for a long time now, and a lot of RC Clubs that have their own websites, use it.
One of the reasons it’s so popular is because they make it very easy for people like me who can write code to make “plugins”. A plugin is a piece of extra software that adds extra features to the main software. For WordPress, there are literally tens of thousands (it’s estimated 60 or 70 thousand) of plugins that cover a vast number of things that might want to do with your website. For example, this site is a WordPress site, and I use quite a few plugins to create the store, to automatically share my posts on Facebook and all sorts of things.
One thing that has bugged me for a while is that there isn’t really an efficient, modern, all-in-one-place software that make the job of running an RC Club easier. There are lots of bits of software for specific jobs , but most clubs end up with a hotch-potch collection of software which not only mean a lot of regular subscriptions, but also a lot of tools and homebrew bodge fixes that all need a lot of time to set up, maintain and move data in-between.
There are some WordPress plugins that are aimed at managing clubs with members, but they are all very expensive, and all of them would take quite a lot of work to do anything useful for an RC Racing Club. So having some time on my hands, I decided to have a go at filling that gap.
I’ve started with an RC Club’s most valuable resource, it’s Membership. When Installed, the plugin sets up a membership database. The process takes seconds, and soon as it’s installed members can start applying for membership. There is a step by step install process that helps the club set up their website, add their members (including a CSV and Excel spreadsheet importer, so you don’t have to type it all in again). Set up and accept fees. Let parents manage entries for juniors. All the tedious admin jobs.
The membership database is nearly done, and I’ll soon be starting on a system to organise championships and race meetings in a way that make it easy for members to enter meetings, and keep track of their entry.
I’ll also be putting in a feature that makes it easy to send all the data of the meeting entries into RC Timing and other popular timing software.
Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to know more, and of course I’m open to any suggestions of features you like..