What is RCMS?

What is RCMS?
The Racquetball Content Management System [RCMS] is a powerful – yet remarkably simple to use – website tool developed specifically for the sport of racquetball. For any potential website author, RCMS makes it easy to quickly and efficiently create a web presence for any racquetball organization, club, league, university program or individual athlete. For the browser, RCMS tools are designed to provide the most complete and targeted sport-specific information, in ways that make sense to the racquetball audience.

But the primary advantage of RCMS is its ability to allow the “non-techie” to author, edit, and manage content without the assistance of a webmaster. That's right ... no coding, no FTP access, no web guru ... just the enthusiasm and willingness of individuals who want to provide quality content about their favorite sport. With RCMS your group can share authoring and updating duties, rather than burning out another volunteer or waiting for a high-priced professional to find time for your project.

The result? When responsibilities are shared, rather than centralized with one person, websites are easily developed, then maintained effectively and kept up-to-date in a timely manner. RCMS can help any individual or group do a better job of marketing the events and programs that make racquetball so dynamic.

Features & benefits

Features & Benefits

Online administration of everything – Everything about the website is managed via the web browser. There are no special software or hardware requirements.

Easy to use – Absolutely NO need for any web authoring tools or coding proficiency. Anyone with basic word processing skills can do it.

Unified racquetball database – Each organization can share its data within the network and visitors to any RCMS website can easily find tournaments, facilities, and players from any RCMS website.

Professional quality, unlimited support – RCMS is built from the ground up by a professional web developer and unlimited support is available via email or phone.

Integration with TMS (coming soon) – Seamlessly transfer data between your RCMS website and the leading tournament management application (TMS from Sirius Software). RCMS has partnered with Sirius Software to offer the most complete website and tournament management suite available anywhere. www.tennisinformation.com

Integration with USAR* (coming soon) – Seamlessly transfer data between your RCMS website and USAR systems. This transfer of data will be easy, seamless and require very little effort from you. *Note: this functionality is dependent on the USAR making these system interfaces available.

Robust Content Modules – With over 40 different types of content modules, most of your design work has already been done! You can add any module to a page and alter the layout at any time. RCMS has over 20 modules build specifically for managing racquetball related content such as graphical tournament draws, online tournament entries, player profiles, and much more.

Custom Modules – You can have custom modules built for your specific needs and plug them into the system at any time. Any modules that have been custom built just for your website will only be available to your website.

Automatic File Management – File management is a powerful tool that allows administrators the ability to upload files and images directly from their computer directly to your portal. An uploaded file becomes instantly available to be utilized on your portal or listed in a module that handles documents or file downloads.

Stylesheet Driven – Your website is delivered with an inbuilt style sheet configured to your specifications. Style elements such as font type, color, bullet points and background colors are automatically applied to any new content added to your portal. This ensures a uniformed look and feel is maintained across the website.

Password Protected Content – You have full control over who can access each area the site. One site can feature a number of password protected areas allowing different access to buyers, suppliers, members, or resellers, depending on your main contact groups. You can even include a staff-only Intranet Area.

Site Settings – Your site Administrator can control all aspects of the site through the site setting page: title of site, search engine description and key words, user welcome messages, vendor banner advertising, and more!

Bulk Email – RCMS includes a bulk email feature that allows you to choose the mailing list to receive the email. Users have the ability to opt-in/opt-out of any mailing list in compliance with anti-spam regulations.

HTML Newsletters – In addition to the Bulk email service is an HTML Newsletter module that allows you to create, send and archive newsletter. Newsletter can be assigned to any group of users you desire, allowing powerful targeted marketing

Advertising Revenue – Receive payment for banner advertising and manage sophisticated advertising campaigns. The system automatically tracks the number of times an ad was displayed and tracks the number of click-throughs. Ads can also set to randomly display based on desired CPM and even set to expire on a certain date.

Search Engine Submission – Submit your website to the leading search engine Google directly from your web administration page. The RCMS has been specifically designed to supply Google with relevant information that will attempt to place your site in the best position on the Google search results. These important details that include the sites description and a list of keywords can be updated at any time via the Site Settings page.

Roles Based Security – Set the access and editing rights for each individual user. The user then simply logs in to the website and can immediately edit the content they have permissions for. Editing rights can be assigned across the whole website, a single page, or down to an individual module on any given page. You can configure any number of security groups with editing rights to different areas of your website. Each individual can then be assigned to multiple roles.

Website Analytics – The Site Log includes a number of reports on you site statistics including site hits, page views, browser information and more. A number of reports are available covering everything you would need to know about your user trends. Reports include: Detailed site log, Page popularity, Page views by day, Page views by day of week, Page views by hour, Page views by month, User frequency, User registration by country, User registration by date.

WYSIWYG Editing – Many of the modules use a built-in “WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet” editor assist in helping to layout the content. Advanced users also have the option to view the actual HTML code used in the presentation; however no HTML knowledge is required

Site Skins – Choose from a selection of pre-designed template site skins. Skins can be changed at any time, without the need to alter any of your content. Skinning allows a variety of alternative design options, giving your site a completely new look at the click of a button! You can pick your look and feel from a pre-defined list of free skins or have a custom skin designed for you by a professional graphic artist.

Recycle Bin – The recycle bin automatically keeps track of any deleted content so you easily restore it in the event of error.

eStore (coming soon) – Built-in ecommerce store. Your visitors will be able to shop at a customized eStore branded just for your website in partnership with a racquetball product fulfillment partner. Revenue from the eStore will be split with the state association.

In addition, you will be able to setup your own private store front for selling any other type of goods or services directly to your visitors.

Mobile device support (coming soon) – Allows users to view the website content on their PDA or web enabled phone.

Current module list

Content Module List
Standard Website Content Modules

Account Login

This simple module provdes the ability for the visitor to login to the website.
Once authenticated, registered users may be given special access to restricted areas of the website or content may be customized for particular user groups.
Registered users are also able to interact with your website via online pools, posting messages in the Forum, maintaining their own Player Profile, maintaining court facility data, and much more.

Advertisements

RCMS offers an integrated vendor and advertising management system, which includes the deployment of banner advertising.
A simple vendor management interface gives administrators the ability to set the display period, size of advertisment, cost and number of impressions as well as managing the complete billing process. Banners can be any size and can be added to both the standard header banner or to any web pages on your portal.
RCMS can be configured to automatically email reports to your advertisers showing the number of times their advertisment was displayed and/or clicked on.

Announcements

Announcements allows the author to display regular announcements to the visitor. The announcements module shows a portion of an article allowing the user to scan for content that is most relevant to them.
Each announcement can be linked to either a local link (e.g. another page in your website), and external link (e.g. a page on a external site) or to a file (e.g. a PDF document that can be downloaded).
Each announcement can be set to expire on a certain date. Setting an expiration date can be vitally important when posting specials offers or date sensitive material and the announcement will automatically disappear after the expiration date.
The module also offers the option to syndicate the content (via RSS), allowing you to feed your announcements to other websites.

Contacts

Allows you to display a list of contact information related to your website.
Each contact includes name, position, email address, and two telephone numbers.

Discussion

This module is a simplified version of a Forum module and allows very quick and easy communication on any subject.

Documents

This module allows you create a document repository on any web page.
For example, you may wish to post hardcopy version of tounament applications, etc.
The module include fields for document owner, last updated, etc.

Events List/Calendar

This module resembles a calendar and allows you to add important information related to events or meetings . The calendar can easily be switched to a list view depending on which best suits your purpose. You are also able to define repeat events across the calendar year.
Management of this module is through a simple administration interface for both the List/Calendar display options as well as input fields for the following: Title, Description, Icon (optional), Occurs Every, Start Date and Expiration offer the following set to expire on any give date.
Note: this module is not intended for Tournaments as there is a special module just for Tournaments.

eStore (coming soon)

This collection of modules will setup a virtual store online and handle all the products, categories, cross-selling, customer management, etc for selling things on the website.
Revenue from any products sold through your website will be split with your organization

FAQs

This module gives you the ability to add a list of Frequently Asked Questions to any part of your website.
Questions and answers can be added, edited or deleted in relationship to customer feedback and requirements.

Feedback

This module can be added to any area of the site to gather feedback related either to the overall website or to a specific subject.
The module canbe configured to send the Feedback to any valid email address.

Form Creator

The Form Creator module is an extremely flexible tool allowing you to create just about any type of online data driven form within a few minutes.
Forms can be used to gather information from your visitors such as player profile data, court facility data, or even for conducting secure online voting procedures for things like board elections.
All results from user-submitted forms are stored in the data base and can even quickly be exported to an Excel spreadsheet for analysis.

Forum

The Forum is shared discussion area available to every organization on the RCMS system.
Visitors to any website using the Forum will be able to see posts and talk to visitors to any other website using the Forum. This helps to build a sense of community both with your organization and also within the racquetball community as a whole.
The Forum includes all the administrative functions you would expect including the ability to set up polls and even ban abusive posters.

IFrame

The IFrame module allows you to quickly embed the entire content of another website directly into your website.
For example, you could easily embed “www.espn.com” within a window on one of your web pages.

Image

This module simply displays an image with the option to add a suitable description which is visible on mouse over.
Images can be generated at any particular size, from the high resolution original stored on the server.
The ability to generate thumbnails on the fly, improving the end user viewing experience especially over a slow Internet connection.

Links

This module displays a list of hyperlinks to either external or internal content.
Links can be created to any internal content located on any internal, stored as an image or file on your local server; or to a file, image or web page any external website.
Links can be configured to display either vertically or horizontally on the page, or as a drop down box.
Links will appear alphabetically by default, or you can manually set the order as required.
A suitable description or summary of the link can be set to appear either on mouse over, or when the link is clicked.

MapQuest

This module renders a map of any address via the MapQuest API.
The module will also render driving directions to the location if the user is logged in.

Message Board

This module is similar to the Discussion module except that it renders threads in a slightly different format.

Multipage Content

This module allows the author to easily create an automatically indexed multipage content. Each page has all the edit abilities of the basic Text/HTML module and pages can re-ordered quickly and easily.
The module includes extensive view options to customize the appearance of the index and the layout of the pages.

NewsArticles

The module is very similar in concept to the Announcements module except that it also allows for website visitor to submit their own news (with optional approval by the website admin).
The module also includes full search and syndication ability (via RSS)

NewsFeeds

Renders news feeds on your site (via RSS). News feeds provide your visitors with up-to-date, topical information on any range of topic.
The addition of automatically updating news feeds ensures your web site is a place worth visiting again and again! In addition, this module can be configured to listen to content (such as Announcements) that are syndicated by other websites.
For example, you could set a NewsFeed module to listen for news from the USRA and this module would automatically update your website content whenever the USRA publishes “News” to their website.

Newsletters

Author can create an HTML formatted newsletter, which can be emailed to mailing lists.
The module automatically stores the newsletter for later reference. Also allows saving of rough drafts and templates.

Photo Gallery

This module allows the storage and presentation of albums and sub-albums of digital photos, movies, and sound files.
The module can be set to render images in a slideshow format and it also allows for captions and descriptions of each item.

Private Message / Message Count

These two module work together to allow RCMS user to send private message to each other.
The Private Messages module can be set to automatically formward messages to a permanent email account.
The Message Count module simply reports the number of message the user has.

Random Image

This module allows you to specify a list of associated images and the module will randomly select on image every time the page is loaded. This is good to creating a sense of fresh content for the visitor.
The module includes options to specify the height, width, and cpation for each image.

Search (coming soon)

This search module can be added to any page and customized depending on the page content.
The search module will find content ANY where in your website including hard copy documents you have stored in your file system

SiteMap

This module automatically generates a SiteMap based on the page hierarchy of your website. The navigation tree is built for you so there is no need to maintain a list of links.

Survey

Allows you to add an online poll to your website. Any number of questions can be set and the results displayed.
The survey can be configure to allow multiple votes per person of a single vite per person.
Results can be kept as private or publicly viewable.

Text/HTML

Design content in a browser based visual editor using either straight text or html.
Images are easily uploaded to the server an then added via the same visual editor.
This is most basic of all the modules but perhaps also the most powerful. Any standard HTML can be placed in this module and it will appear just as you would expect to see it from a web editor like FrontPage or even Word.

URL Redirect

This module will automatically redirect a visitor to another URL.
The module includes option to conditionally redirect based on user profiles, dates, and many other options.

User Account

This module provides the basic interface for the the visitor to register and maintain their RCMS account.
The module also includes the functionality for the user to opt-in/opt-out of any public mailing lists available from any RCMS website.

User Defined Table

This module allows you to create a custom data table for managing tabular information.
Data can be arranged and defined in a manner that best suits your requirements, and there is also and option to filter the displayed data either A-Z or Z-A.

Users Online

Displays a timely list of all the RCMS registered users currently online.
This module is shared by all websites using RCMS so you can easily see and contact people in other state associations.

Weather Network

This module will show the weather conditions of a given location via an API to the Weather Network weather service

XML/XSL

For advanced users, this module displays the result of an XML/XSL transform. XML and XSL is a useful way of handling text based information that does not require the use of a database.
Using XSL style sheets the XML data can be rendered in any manner that suits your requirements. The modules configuration setting i.e. location of the XML/XSL file either internal or externally are stored in the database.
This module is also very useful for displaying data that comes from an outside system (such as the Rankings system)

Racquetball Specific Content Modules

Player Management

These modules handle all the player profiles
These modules could be configured to use the USAR membership database if/when available.

Players List

The modules presents a list of players, complete with sort, filter and search capabilties.
The player data is unified across all RCMS websites. Visitors to any RCMS website can easily see player data from any other state without having to leave your website.

Player Detail

This module presents the detail information about a player.
Registered users can maintain their own player profile and specify which data to show/hide to the public.
The module can also show the players rankings from eithe a custom ranking algorythm or the USAR ranking system (if/when available)
The module also includes the ability to email the player directly without revealing the players email address publicly.
Also includes alist of Court Facility the player has indicated they play at.

Facility Management

These modules handle all the player profiles
These modules could be configured to use the USAR membership database if/when available.

Facilities List

This module presents a list of racquetball court facilities, complete with sort, filter, and search capabilities.
This data is unified across all rCMS websites so visitors to your website can easily see the court facility data from other RCMS websites without having to leave your website.
Coming soon! Interactive court finder that will allow the visitor to input their address and the Court Finder will find the closest X number of court to their location and also provide a map showing the relative location of all the courts facilities, with driving directions.

Facility Detail

This module presents the detail information about the court facility.
Includes an interactive MapQuest map with driving directions if the user is logged in.
Also includes a cross index to the players who have specified they play at this location.

Tournament Management

These module handle all the promotion, pre-event, and post-event activities for your tournaments.
Coming soon! Integration with TMS, the industry leading tournament management software for all your during-tournament activities (scheduling, court management, etc)

Tournament List

This module presents a list of tournaments to the visitor, complete with sort, filter, and search capabilities.
This data is unified across all RCMS websites enabling visitors to any RCMS website to easily see the tournament data from any other RCMS website. Tournaments are only editable by the organization that created them.
View options include the ability to only show past or future tournaments and also to set the default list format (List / Calendar)

Tournament Detail

This module allows the tournament director to set the tournament name, start date / time , end date / time, and signup deadline and time.
Includes fields to specify the primary contact person for the tournament
Includes functionality to specify if the tournament is USAR “sanctioned“
Include the ability to force the tournament to show up in any search reuslts regardless of location specified (useful for regional or national tournaments)

Tournament Facilities

Allow the Tournament Director to choose Facilities from the database which will provide a link to the Facility detail

Tournament Entry Management

These modules control players entry into the tournament

Tournament Entry List

This module presents a list of entrants to the visitor
View Options include list format or drop down box.

Tournament Entry Detail

This module shows the detail information about an entry
Any new entries or changes to existing entries are automatically emailed to tournament director specified as the primary contact in the Tournament Detail module.
Includes a cross reference to all of the Tournament Events the player is entered in so the visitor can see the other entrants to the event.
Coming soon! Ability to download entrants directly to TMS
Coming soon! Ability to collect credit card payments for entry fees via PayPal

Tournament Event Management

These module handle pre-tournament event setup

Tournament Event List

This module presents a list of offered events for the tournament.
View Options include list format or drop down box.

Tournament Event Detail

This module shows the detail information about the offered event.
Includes a cross-index list of all the entrants in the event.

Tournament Draw Management

These modules handle post-tournament draw results reporting

Tournament Draw List

This module presents a list of played draws to the visitor
View Options include list format or drop down box.

Tournament Draw Detail

This module presents a graphical draw sheet reprenting the actual draw.
The tournament director has the ability to edit the draw sheet in place and post the results immediately.
Can be used for both doubles anbd singles as well as round robin ans stright draw formats.
Includes ability to specify times and/or scores for each match in the draw.

Tournament Results

This module summarizes the results of each Tournament Draw (first place/second place)

Rankings

This module represents custom algorythms to rank players based on the results entered via the Tournament modules.
Each organization can have their own custom rankings process.
Can be integrated with the USAR rankings system if/when available

What is RCMS?

How does it work?

Features & benefits

Current module list

What does it cost?

Who is using RCMS?