Registration with Extra Details

Tournr has recently helped with the registration for the Ride Surf Kayak British Championships which has been a baptism of fire in many respects. As it stands there are 100 entries over 9 classes of competition, which is far and away the biggest event Tournr has been used for so far.

In doing so there were a couple of additions the guys at Ride wanted to be added for Tournr to be useful for them, so I’m going to introduce them to you.

Extra Registration Detail

They wanted the ability to record the BCU / CANI / WCA etc membership number of each competitor, (for the insurance of the event), Tournr initially didn’t cope with this as I’d only added email, phone and address as fields a competitor could have. The problem is that a football / scrabble / other competition isn’t going to want to have a BCU field, (they may have their own governing body though), and I didn’t want to have to restrict it to being just a ‘Governing body membership number’ field. So now we have an ‘Extra detail’ field. This can be anything you want:

When you set up your competition to have this field a competitor will see this when they register:

Which, by pressing the ‘eye’ () icon next to their name will show you all the details:

At the moment, there is only one dynamic registration field like this, there will be more at a later date.

Classes Button

Simple and should have been there from the start, but a quick way to get to the classes you want to register for is now provided by the ‘Classes’ button, to be found just under the title:

Documents

I’ve not really documented (ha!) much about these yet, as they primarily help Organisers a bit later on in the day, but in essence they provide an Excel (or plain CSV) file giving all the details of the competitors, useful for printing sign in sheets etc. I’ve also added the number of classes each competitor has entered to the ‘All Competitors List’.

New Feature: Types

Tournr has never really cared about the type of your competition, it’s quite happy to run anything with you and that is still the case today. But! If you want to give your classes types, well now you can!

This isn’t a huge feature, but it’s needed for a couple of things that are coming up that I promise you will be very nifty indeed. So, on to the show and tell.

What is a Type?

A type is a classification of your class, by the sport or game type, it can be a broad classification (e.g. Kayak) to specific (e.g. K-1 Sprint 500m) though ideally, the more concise the better.

How do I set a Type?

As always, login and go to your tournament. In there go down to your classes, and click on ‘edit’ to change the class you want to add a type to:

There is a new text box called ‘Type’, click in there and type in the name of the type you want to classify your class as.

You’ll get a loading indicator whilst Tournr searches for valid matches, and if it finds any, it will show them to you on the screen:

When you save and go back to your classes you’ll see the type next to the class name:

To remove your type, simply edit the class again and delete the type then save!

Now, of course Tournr hasn’t got every sport, not even close (in fact at the time of writing, we’ve got the Olympic Kayak / Canoe and surf classes), so what happens if the class you want isn’t listed?

Just type it in, Tournr might give you suggestion as to what it thinks you mean, but you are free to ignore it!

Results in:

These custom entries won’t show up in the Tournr suggestions initially as they need to be approved by an administrator of the site. If we’ve missed something please feel free to use the feedback link to let us know!

Why do this?

I hinted at a couple of things that I can do when I have this information, firstly (and I think pretty importantly) I’d like to be able to search by sport / game type, to be able to filter all the tournaments by type would be very handy for competitors, once you have that you can do some other things (one of which will be very soon and I don’t want to ruin the surprise).

Just to make it clear: You don’t have to set this at all, you can leave all classes without types and Tournr will work just fine, but I think it will help in the long run.

Tournr Tips #8 – PayPal

IMPORTANT NOTE!! This tip is now out of date – please see PayPal Integration to integrate PayPal.

The description part of a competition allows you to embed most things you can find on the internet. Handily this also applies to PayPal, quite often these days competitions like to take money via PayPal – there are lots of reasons, competitors can use credit cards or bank accounts to make payments and in a safe way. It also allows an organiser to manage the payments, issue refunds without having to post off a cheque. Not having to deal with Cheques is a big plus point in itself!

Generally – PayPal has 2 ways to send payments, the first is you put an email address in and ‘send’ your payment via that address, the downside to that scenario is that someone can easily mistype an email – not everyone can copy/paste (for example, reading from a phone screen whilst typing into a webpage), and some characters 0 and O (that’s ‘zero’ and the letter ‘o’) can easily be mixed up.

The second way generally seen is via the PayPal button – which is ace, as you can even go the whole hog and create a cart system.

Tournr will work equally well with both, but in this post I’m just going to show how to do the button code, as typing an email address is easy, and you already know how to do that!

To use buttons, you do need to have Premier or Business account with PayPal. This allows you to accept credit cards etc, I believe (and it’s been a long time since I’ve done it) you need to verify your account, PayPal is very good at helping you with this, so I’ll leave it to them.

If you have a premier or business account already, then we’re good to go, and we want to go to the button factory – (that link takes you to the UK version, but I imagine it will redirect to the region you are in). You have a choice of 5 button types, In principle you can embed any of them, but we’re only really interested in the ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Add To Cart’ buttons. You can use either for doing most of the cases you’re going to be looking at, with you needing to do slightly more to use the ‘Cart’ button, but we’ll cross that bridge a little further down.

Buy Now

Buy Now is most appropriate for a competition with one class, or just a set entrance fee. It’s a simple one click payment option. You can also use it for multiple classes if you have a simple set up.

From the ‘button factory’ select the Create your button now link, if you’re not logged in you will be asked to.

Here you can choose a different button type (if you’ve changed your mind), but we’ll stick with the current one. The next thing to fill in is the ‘Item name’, generally, to make life easier, it’s best to stick in the name of your competition. If you regularly run the ‘British Open’ it’s worth putting the name as something like ‘British Open 2014’ so you can distinguish it from the next time you run it – you can use the Item ID for this as well, so something like BO2014 might be appropriate.

If you have only one entry, then add in the price (and choose your currency), then press Create Button. If you have more than one type of entry, let’s do some customising!

We have 2 options, a drop-down with or without prices. You’d use the without prices option if you’re looking at a single price, but multiple options – i.e. a competitor can only take part in one class. Most likely you’re looking for the option with prices.

Just fill in the payment details, and this is entirely up to you. Let’s say we allow competitors to enter up to 3 classes, the first class we charge at £10, and each subsequent class is only £5 we might setup our button to look like this:

Which results in a button like:

Next we can skip the 2nd and 3rd steps of the button factory (by all means look at them and see if there is anything you want to do – one thing that can be handy is to restrict the number of entries allowed using the ‘Track Inventory’ option).

We want to press the ‘Create Button’ button now:

Now you are taken to a page called ‘Add your button code to your webpage’ which is handy, as that’s what we want to do. You’ll see a box with a ‘Website’ tab, what you want to do is copy that code and paste it into your ‘Description’ of your competition:

(Where the red arrow is)

Which when you save will give you this on your competition page:

The competitor can now press the ‘Buy Now’ button, and PayPal deals with the rest.

Add To Cart

Add To Cart is most appropriate for a multiple-class competition, where competitors can enter in multiple classes, or where you need to have optional extras such as ‘day insurance’.

It’s a very similar process to the one above, you can decide to have one button per price point, so you might have a ‘First Class’ button where the price is £10 then a second button for subsequent classes, which is set at £5, the choice as they say is yours (though please email me if you want advice on what to do, I’ll be more than happy to help!).

In this case – you’ll add multiple buttons using the same approach as you would for the ‘Buy Now’ button. The only extra thing you need to do is create a ‘View Cart’ button, which you can see as an option at the bottom of the page when you ‘Create’ your cart button:

This doesn’t really have any options, and is a straight copy/paste job.

Tournr Tips #7 – Embedding things

The description part of a competition can be more than plain text, it actually uses a type of text entry called ‘MarkDown’ (you can find out more about that by clicking on that link), which is becoming a standard in forums and messaging boards. It allows you to put bullets, headings etc, but without having to learn HTML.

One of the nice things about that is that you aren’t restricted to just text, you can embed other things, such as YouTube videos, Vimeo.

How?

This demo is with YouTube, but the same principle exists for pretty much all the media sites, if you have difficulty, please feel free to email me via the site and I’ll get you working!

First, let’s find the video we want to embed, for demo purposes I’ve gone with the Shoreline Triathlon (see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCHwieXHhrY). What we need is the embed code. To get that, go to the video page, and click on the ‘Share’ link:

Next, choose the ‘Embed’ option:

Below this, you have some options you can play around with, I’d stick with the default settings, but feel free to play around with the video size.

When you’re all happy, select the code in the text box (it should begin <iframe), right click on it (or whatever the equivalent is in the Mac world) and select ‘Copy’:

Go to your Competition on Tournr, and Select Edit:

In the ‘description’ field, paste the code you just copied from YouTube.

Save your tournament:

And now you have your video in the competition!

Recap

Look for the ‘Share’ link on a page you want to show in Tournr, look for the Embed code and copy and paste it into the description field of your Competition.

By the way – this will also work for Groups, Terms and Conditions etc, which is pretty cool!

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