Portfolio - Dressage Ireland
I retired from maintaining this website in 2017 and it was taken over by a web design agency who attempted to replace it with their own “design” but many of the features could not be reproduced by the generalized CMS they used and are therefore still in place and the result is an awful mishmash of different designs.
The pages which have been replaced are agonizingly slow and the navigation system is very poorly implemented.
This website features:
- Coded entirely in PHP to make the website more easily maintainable
- Dynamic/static design - much of the content drawn from a MySQL database
- A Google-friendly site structure to facilitate SEO
- An online membership form (PHP, MySQL, vanilla Javascript)
- An online horse registration form (PHP, MySQL, vanilla Javascript)
- An online entry form for national championship competitions (PHP, MySQL, vanilla Javascript)
- A calendar of upcoming competitions, entered and edited via via the regional websites (PHP, MySQL)
- A scoring system to cater for national competitions and which includes a per-judge, move-by-move entry system (PHP, MySQL, vanilla Javascript)
- Results of all registered combinations (since 2010) including a calculation of each horse’s points, entered and updated via the regional websites and by the championships scoring system (PHP, MySQL)
- A live scoreboard for national competitions with a rolling display of results which have been entered into the scoring system (PHP, MySQL, vanilla Javascript)
- Integrated with databases of regional websites to display future show dates (PHP, MySQL)
- E-mail addresses viewable and clickable but hidden from spambots using a bespoke javascript obfuscation technique
- Bespoke PDF membership forms, horse registration forms and entry forms, all including Javascript powered interactivity
This bespoke content management system features:
- A searchable list of members and a system to edit individual members or add new ones (PHP, MySQL, vanilla Javascript)
- A searchable list of registered horses and a system to edit individual horses or add new ones (PHP, MySQL, vanilla Javascript)
- A searchable/editable list of downgraded horses (PHP, MySQL)
- A searchable/editable list of online membership registrations (PHP, MySQL)
- A searchable/editable list of registered dressage judges (PHP, MySQL)
- A searchable/editable list of online entries for national competitions (PHP, MySQL)
- A results (scoring) editing system (PHP, MySQL, vanilla Javascript)
- A system for producing various statistics such as numbers of member registrations, member registrations by member type, by region, by payment, the number of shows per member of each region and various judging statistics (PHP, MySQL, GD library)
This website started out as a simple HTML redesign of the original Dressage Ireland website and has quickly grown in complexity to incorporate the features listed above plus many more besides.
Quite a lot of websites at the moment are merely implementations of WordPress blogs with freely available (style) templates applied and with minor tweaks made to them, which use entirely inappropriate navigation systems and which are not fit for purpose – essentially they are overly complex “programs” which do only one thing - they display “posts”.
The Dressage Ireland website, on the other hand, was a collection of separate “programs” each of which performed an entirely different task from the others - tasks which are not possible with something like WordPress.
The system for calculating horse points is a clear and transparent system which is continuously updated and it replaced an antiquated by-hand system whereby points were made available a maximum of twice per year.
