Over the past several months we have been developing an online fitness center which has been built using Drupal 5. I’d like to personally thank all the Drupal community contributors for helping us make this website a success. We learned a great deal over the past several months, and wanted to share our site with any of you that would like to learn from it, or just look around.
To Access the site:
If you just want to look around, then use “demo” as the username and password. To create your own account, visit go.ipodfitnesscenter.com and click Join Today. (It’s Free to Join, but you will need a valid email address).
About the site:
The Ipod Fitness Center is an online fitness center and social networking website that utilizes the Apple Nano and the Nike+ Sport Kit to automatically track your exercise activity. Anyone can join for free, and use the site, but you really need a NANO and Nike+ to take advantage of our site. The best way to see what our site does is to watch the Flash Presentation at http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/index1.html.
Core Drupal Modules Used:
Aggregator, Blog, Comment, Contact, Help, Menu, Profile, Search, Taxonomy, Upload
User Contributed Modules Used:
Buddylist, Event, ImageCache, Javascript Tools, PrivateMsg, Authorship, Avatar Selection, FAQ, Gallery, Guestbook, Hovertip, Legal, Masquerade, Menu per Role, Recipe, Modr8, Tac Lite, Tiny MCE, Userplane Chat, and Views.
Unique Aspects of our Site:
Charting – We could not find any good example of people that integrated flash based charts into their Drupal Site. We created this functionality using FusionCharts. We have an interactive Run Graphing module that you can see when you’re in the site at http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/fitness/mystats/ or you can see us graph an individual run by clicking on any of our runs http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/myFitness/rundetail.php?id=948375346
HTML Mail – We installed a couple of the Drupal HTML and Mime Mail packages but had a hard time keeping the HTML based mail out of Junk email folders. We finally created this functionality by integrating phpMailer into Drupal. You can see an advanced usage of this by visiting our Invite a Friend module and clicking the Preview Button. http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/ifc_invite
Ipod Nike+ Interface – We did extensive custom programming to allow you to link, chart, and analyze information from your Nano. You’ll see these everywhere in the site. Visit http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/fitness to see some of the custom panels.
Teams – Everything on our site is pretty much team based. It allows people to create new teams, invite members to their teams, have team competitions, etc. We looked at the superb OG module, but decided to build all of our own team functionally using MySQL and Drupal. http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/fitness_center/myteam/
Flash Integration – In addition to our main flash site demo (mentioned above - at http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/index1.html). We also have several flash apps integrated throughout the site. http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/billing/options
Custom Blocks – You’ll find dozens of customized blocks on our site doing all kinds of cool stuff. Visit the main page of our Blog to see several examples. http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/featured
Chatroom – We have Integrated Userplane Webchat http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/webchat. It works well, but we still feel we have a lot of work to do in this area. We’d like a pop-up version of the chat, and also be able to utilize their IM capability.
Custom User Profiles – We did extensive modification to the User Profile using techniques found on the Drupal Community. (Using template.php). See an example by clicking on My Profile. http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/user/5
Wizards – If you’ve tried to create multi page wizard type forms in Drupal, you know they are not too easy. But they can be done. Visit our Starting Line to see a great example of a Drupal based wizard. http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/startingline
Our Coolest Feature – The Feature that our users like the most is our monthly fitness challenges where we compete with other members around the country. This month, they get to win US Flags, TShirt, etc. We have a new challenge every month, and this keeps users visiting our site every day to see their progress. Check out the July Parti at http://www.ipodfitnesscenter.com/julyparti
I hope you enjoy our site preview, please feel free to ask questions on anything you see interesting, or by all means, if you have suggestions on how we can improve the site, please let me know. Currently, the site is pretty US specific, but we’ll be adding international support over the next several months as our site membership grows. Also, if you have a NANO and want to get Fit and Have Fun with us, you can get a Nike Link starter kit from our product sponsor at https://www.vitalif.com/testNew2.php?pid=1067&&productSell=2
Jim Fulford
jim@ipodfitnesscenter.com
Comments
Wow, that is great use of
Wow, that is great use of the drupal platform!
I have a link and nano, unfortunately I mostly just use it for the pace being told in my ear, and not so much for the data tracking. After logging into the thing with demo, it looks very detailed, way more then the onces i've put on nike.com.
The stats had numbers overlapping on the demo one, dates on the bottom axis.
Also, your favicon might wanna change :-)
Also had a couple display errors in firefox 2.0 (css stuff overlapping)
Overall I think you have a great great resource! advertising of course would be difficult with the nike site being promoted with the product, but yours is definitely more detailed! I will bookmark and check back :-) Good job!
IF you have the Nike link
You should definately register and input your Nike Data so you can see the detailed tracking on your own runs. It will take only a few seconds to have all of your data online.
The Nike site is great, but it really does not promote commuinty. Mine is more of a social networking site for runners and walkers. Drupal was a great platform to develop in, and our users are loving the site.
Also, what favicon should I change :)
Thanks for the positive feedback.
Jim
Using FusionCharts
Hello Jim,
that looks like a great site.
I have a question regarding FusionCharts. I'm using it for my site but I'm having some problems with the integration:
When the chart is loaded I get a page error: "The website xxxxxx cannot be opened. Operation Aborted". After a few refreshes the chart gets displayd. And thereafter the error shows again.
This error only happens with IE7 and IE6.
I suspect it has to do with the way i'm calling fusioncharts.php. At this moment i just call it on the page i'm building the chart:
Do you have any advice if there is anything i can do differently?
Thank you
I like the menu very
I like the menu very much
How is it possible to makeit likethat with subcategories on mysite, do you use a special kind of menu? or just the default one???