New Zealand Running Calendar Goes Live

Posted April 18th, 2010 in Case Studies and SilverStripe

I finally pushed my New Zealand Running Calendar website live this morning directly before going off to run the Run Auckland 10K on the Te Atatu Peninsula (which I ran in 43:31). As with the Motor Home Road Trip website which we pushed live earlier this week there's still a lot of content to be added and once I have all the content loaded I'll be adding some more functionality.

Purpose of the website

The New Zealand Running Calendar is intended to make it easy for people in New Zealand to find out when races (marathons, half-marathons, 10K, etc) are coming up. They can search by region, distance, when it's an on-road or off-road event and for weekday or weekend only races.

Where possible I have a summary page of information relating to the event, including location, distances, start times, costs and a location map, along with a link to official website containing further information.

Once I have the full calendar of events loaded in, I'll be adding additional functionality to allow people to save events to their own calendar so they can easily keep a record of what's coming up for them. The natural extension for this is to then have social networking elements to allow them to share their events with their friends, blog about them etc.

Technologies

The website was coded using SilverStripe, which uses PHP and MySQL and uses jQuery and the Facebox plug-in for showing event information in a Facebook style popup. Event pages can be loaded both in a regular browser window or in the popup using Ajax; the same URL is used but different templates are used depending on the request type.

Google maps are used on the site to show event locations. The Yahoo YUI compressor is used to minify Javascript and CSS files. Apache's mod_deflate is used to compress requested files and mod_expires to help with browser caching (this isn't yet implemented but will be by tomorrow).

Screenshots

Here's a couple of screenshots showing the running calendar homepage and then the event popup when an event has been clicked.

Further development and content updates

As I mentioned at the start of this post although I have the site finally online I still need to get cracking with loading the event content, and once that's done add additional functionality. I'll update with further posts here once this has been done, and in the meantime go visit the New Zealand Running Calendar to see it in action.