Some time this year, the committee decided it was time for a new website. While the old one had served us very well for many years, it is showing signs of its age. Most importantly, a fresh look and a mobile friendly layout are needed.

After creating a mock-up for the design, we decided on a colour palette and basic layout. Once these were set, we started programming the site. On top of the already mentioned features, we needed to support already existing features like member management (including payment, license and federation membership), paragliding site database with integration with our weather stations and webcams, events calendar, news section and some others.

The new site also has some new features

Mobile friendly layout

You can now easily view the website on any kind of device, be it smartphone, tablet or ultra wide screen on your computer.

Membership form

A new member can sign up for membership. Both the club and the member will be notified about the request. Once the club has checked the request, they can convert it to a real membership. The member will then be notified about this and will be asked to pay their fees.

Payment reminder

The members list can be filtered for people who have not payed yet. These members can be sent a reminder email with one click.

News section

The news section will function as the main hub to inform members about any news related to the club. Be it internal news or news to be shared with anyone on the internet. Whenever a new post is published with important information, the author can choose to send a notification email to all interested members.

Members can unsubscribe from the newsletter by editing their profile.

Member list

A new member list was added, allowing to see contact information of the other members. In order to respect the legitimate privacy interests of our members, we don't share any information apart from your name by default. If you wish to share your telephone number or email address, you need to enable this in your profile just like you edited your notification settings.

Multi-linguality

Since more and more people in Luxembourg don't speak Luxembourgish, we decided to use English as our main language of the site. Modern web browsers often allow you to translate this into many other languages on the fly. We nevertheless chose a content management system that allows us to translate some of the important sites to other languages. On top of this, we try to also have our news and events in multiple languages.

The future

A website, like so many projects, is never really completed. We will improve the site in the future in order to add more features and improve existing ones. Most importantly we will try to keep the content up to date and relevant.

Some of the planned features are

Event sign up

We currently have a calendar with events. They have a description with image, date and time but don't allow signing up yet. This will hopefully be implemented in the upcoming months. This would allow us to centrally manage any event registration for events organised by the club. Be it for member events like holidays or events open to external parties like tandem weekends.

Paraglidable.com integration

Paraglidable is a machine learning model that tries to predict the flyability of a site at a specific date. Since they offer a public API, it is possible use their data to have predictions about flyability of our sites. We would like to show the flyability score for the upcoming days for each of our sites. In a second step it would be possible to have notifications sent out for days when one of our sites is flyable.

Facebook integration

Since we have a lot of interesting content posted on facebook, we will try to integrate the pages on the new website. Like this, any information on facebook will also show up on the website.

Launch

So when will the site go online? The final launch date is not clear yet. It might take a few more days to finalize everything and get the domain cumulux.lu pointing to the new server. We'll send out a communication once it's online.