As many readers will know I have been the official photographer at Garthorpe for the point-to-point meetings there for some years, and through the contacts I made there I have been helping out with making sure that press releases had images to accompany them. I had also been instrumental in setting Garthorpe up with a fully-functional website, through which we could issue our own releases, make blog posts, keep visitors up-to-date with going in advance of race meetings, and so on.
At the end of last season I was having a conversation with the Secretary of the Midlands Area Point-To-Point Association, Anna Saunders, and we decided it was important for the Midlands Area to have a website of its own. Midlands Pointing was born.
The Midlands Area Association provides support for all of the meetings and their secretaries. Anna will provide help if they have questions, and it also the conduit for all the information which comes out from the higher point-to-point bodies such as the Point-To-Point Authority, Point-To-Point Owners and Riders Association or the Pony Racing Authority.
The structural needs of the site were not unlike a typical blog. It needed a content management system which any of the Committee could access and use without a great deal of training. It required the ability to upload and display media such as images and video, and it needed facilities to enable interaction with the general public, such as contact forms to enable private contact with Anna and the ability to comment on posts made on the site.
During the development phase it became clear that the ability to sell electronic, downloadable tickets for individual meetings would also be an appropriate and forward-thinking addition.
The resulting site is based on a typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server with WordPress as the core CMS. On its own, WordPress provided most of what we needed but there were additional plugins used to enable some features. Tablepress is used to facilitate the editing of tables used for entries, results and fixture lists. Yoast SEO is used to make sure we are doing what we can to provide a good source of search engine friendly content. Finally, the ticketing element is provided by a combination of Ticket Tailor and Future Ticketing.
You can see Midlands Pointing is action here.