New Site Added – CatholicAthletics.org

We have recently launched the Catholic Athletics website for the guys over at The Saint Sebastian Fund.. The site serves as a clearinghouse for Catholic schools to list their current needs for athletic gear.

Once a need has been listed and approved (via several manual and automated checks), the project goes live, and users can make donations to the listing of their choice. Donations are made via paypal. When a project is fully funded, the school receives the funds and is able to purchase the equipment.

This project was a little different than most any of the projects I have recently worked on in that as it was a project for a non profit, a great deal of care went into developing the flow of the project status and associated legal issues.

It is currently alive and well and generating funds.

Technologies

This site was developed using:

• Ruby on Rails – As there was an incredible amount of object data being held for donors, schools, and projects, we decided that an object based solution would need to be implements from inception.
• Git – All designs were implemented by Jeff Davidson. This meant that the CSS files and templates were scattered a bit. In pretty much all cases (even cases with a sole developer), we use Git to track revision changes for the site.
• Blueprint – when developing informational sites, it’s a very bad idea to rely on css rules to build the site. We always use a template system of some sort. We try to use blueprint when possible, as it’s quick and easy.
• Prototype – Yes, we are well aware of jQuery but the functions we needed were native to rails and prototype, so we decided against loading up another library. Should our needs expand in the future, we might decide to work with jQuery.

If you have any other questions or comments on the development of this site, we’d love to hear from you.