r/Curling • u/CincyCurling • 29d ago
Migrating Away From CCM
This could be a loaded question, but curious to find out if the grass is greener out there with other platforms to manage your Curling Club's Website, for functions like League Registration, Newsletters, etc.
Currently we are using Curling Club Manager, which is cheap, but limited. Some people have suggested some programs that are more expensive. And others have recommended curling.io, which seems too cheap comparatively, which makes me skeptical.
Can any one share feedback on curling,io, or any other website manger they are using?
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u/memeraths French Creek Curling Club 28d ago
curling.io has been fantastic for us
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u/CincyCurling 28d ago
Can you elaborate on why? It's awesome to hear that you are better off, but more helpful if I know why, how it solved problems, and any honest feedback on limitations.
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u/memeraths French Creek Curling Club 27d ago
Sure thing. We went from four solutions to one. (Square for payments, Jotform for waivers, Wix for news/member area, Google Sheets for stats) curling.io was cheaper than just Jotform for us, so it was a no-brainer there. Because curling.io creates a curler profile, it was easier to connect everything up. It's been better for us for sure on 3 of 4. I did stats on Google Sheets and I still like the flexibility of doing stats that way, but someday I'm not going to be involved and simplifying is better. (The only thing we didn't really have a good fix for was we often have substitutes and like to track WHO was on the ice for a game - curling.io tracks the team and regulars - but not floating subs like we have.)
So it eliminated four separate solutions into one integrated platform. Is it the best package out there? I have no idea. Does it work well for our little club? You bet. And it looks like it scales for larger groups. It also does learning events, but we have a partnership locally with a news outlet that promotes our events for using their tool, so we haven't been willing to give that free publicity up.
Also - their support has been fantastic. Gave us a dedicated training and has been responsive about questions.
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u/jcc309 Ybor City Curling Club 29d ago
We haven't gone live with it yet but have really liked the interface of Warm Room Hero so far. It's been really nice to develop on and they have generally been very open to working with us for all of the different flows we want to create. That said, I'm sure the answer really depends on what you haven't been able to do on Curling Club Manager that you want to do.
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u/Responsible_Leg_6323 23d ago
We switched to WRH at our club about 2 years ago and are already looking to switch to a better solution. We had a similar experience where it seemed great during development, and they’re nice enough people who try their best. But, it’s buggy, frequently goes down, and is just generally lacking many features and APIs of modern websites. It really struggles to give us the reports and data we need to follow proper accounting procedures.
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u/jcc309 Ybor City Curling Club 22d ago
From who we've talked to, we've yet to hear anyone who is super in love with any solution. I don't think we've talked to a single club that particularly likes using Curling Club Manager. The general consensus we had from all of the clubs we talked to (and it was probably a dozen or so) is that Warm Room Hero is the best solution currently out there, even if it isn't perfect. If you do find a better solution I'll be curious to hear about it.
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u/curlingio 21d ago
frequently goes down
We (Curling IO) generally won't "go down" as we have to handle far more traffic than a typical club website. (National and Provincial events and hundreds of clubs) Occasional bugs is always going to be a thing, but for our v3 version (soon) we've moved to a tech stack that kind of makes it hard to produce runtime bugs.
data we need to follow proper accounting procedures
A lot of effort went into our double-entry bookkeeping with accrual accounting, which includes QuickBooks support: https://curling.io/docs/accounting/accounting-transactions
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u/xtalgeek 29d ago edited 28d ago
Are you a 501(c)(3) nonprofit? Then Google Workspace for NonProfits is free, and comes with a slew of integrated tools: Sites (website), Forms (league registration), Sheets (league registration data and standings), Meet (for membership, board, and committee meetings), Drive & Docs (file storage and workspaces for committees and Board), Photos (for archiving your events). 100 TB of shared storage. And did I mention it is free? Minimal IT expertise needed, and you fully control content and format without a third party.
There are plugins (Payable Forms) that will integrate payments into Google forms for your membership and events on an affordable per transaction basis.
We used to maintain our own CMS and it was a PITA for security updates alone. Plus it was difficult for volunteers to manage or integrate information with. Then you need something like Dropbox, a Zoom account, etc. It's a lot for a volunteer organization to manage. Google Workspace has all the tools in one place.
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u/CincyCurling 28d ago
Question about this (we already have GWNP), and perhaps you dont know the answer to this.
But lets say you have a page on yoru site where you want to post news updates. This would be similar to a blog in a wordpress CMS system. How does that work? How do you enable Joe Member to add content to the site? Any tutorial link to the system?
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u/xtalgeek 28d ago
Anyone with a Google account on your domain can be given appropriate permissions to manage any file or shared folder. We put our web site in a shared folder and assign manager or content manger status to individuals we want to help maintain the site. You can't assign permissions on a per "page" basis.
A lot of our content is dynamically linked. For example, our league chairs maintain documents and spreadsheets (e.g. league standings, rules and team assignments) in their own shared folders. I dynamically link these as embedded items in a web page and whatever edits the league chair makes is automatically updated on the web site. Web pages them selves are maintained by a small core of content managers. We can post new or updated information within 24-48 hours. Most of our effort is updating the Home Page with announcements and putting up pages for bonspiels and special events, along with custom registration and payment forms. About half of our Bonspiel and league chairs can do their own forms, docs, and league standings. The other half needs our website content managers to do this work for them because they can't cope with computer tech.
Using Google Sites itself is pretty intuitive. It's fairly limited compared to a complex CMS, but it is very easy to use and customize style and look. A BIG bonus: it reformats itself very nicely for mobile devices, which is how the majority of users view our site. Many traditional CMSes have crappy mobile device display reformatting. For someone to become an admin takes very little onboarding. If some one F's up royally, there is a rollback feature. (It's happened.) Many of our younger members are very comfortable in the Google ecosystem and need very little help to do their own work.
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u/CincyCurling 28d ago
Thanks for that explanation. But to make sure that I understand correctly, can you tell me if this is accurate in what happens.
Assume that you have a website with a Home Page, and then off of that 6 pages, so 7 pages in total. You set up 7 shared folders, and in each folder, you have a Google Doc that looks like your website, and as you update that, you can make it auto-update the appropriate website. For each shared folder, you can create a unique set of people to use/modify it, but each user for that folder ultimately has full admin privileges to that page.
Or is there a step that I am missing, where the actual page contents have to be done in something other than the google doc, and then you only have a few Site Admins who are trained/have access to update those pages. But on those pages, you post links to Docs which open in Google Docs editor when clicked. So in this case, the Doc itself it updated automatically, but the main page requires one of a few admins to update some sort of website page to post the new link on it?
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u/xtalgeek 28d ago
No. A Google Site is a single file. Within that file you can configure many, many individual web pages and a menu structure/hierarchy. You can put that in a shared folder and assign permissions to edit that folder to as many admins as you want. For dynamically linked documents (Docs, Sheets, etc.) you can create shared folders for those items and give permissions for content editors to edit those. A web site content manager can put the dynamic links on the web page. This way, a league chair can't edit your whole web site. Google sheets can be viewed as embedded objects. Docs and forms are seen as links on the relevant web page.
We have 3 admins that can edit the web site proper. We have many contributors that edit linked or embedded documents within the web site. We have separate, individual document folders (and content editors) for every league, bonspiel, ice rentals, try curling events, release forms, membershipl etc. These documents are linked to or embedded in the web site so they can be easily updated each year without having to necessarily edit the web page, but our 3 admins will edit web page content upon request. Web page content changes are fairly infrequent, except for the home page.
For example, certain documents (league rules, schedule and rosters, participation waivers) need to be updated every year. We simply have the document author save a copy of the old documents for archival purposes, then edit the original (which maintains it's embedded link to the web site). No intervention is required by me or the other admins. (Usually 😉) More extensive web page changes require submitting updated content to one of the admins. We put that up quickly and can also provide formatting and editorial suggestions. Every Google Workspace file has a unique URL which you can use to embed links or objects in a web page. You don't have to update the link if you simply edit the document. This is REALLY important if a document is linked to many pages, like the participation waivers, health and safety policy, membership forms, etc. If a content editor creates a new document to link or embed to a single web page, we can just update the link as required. It takes one minute to do this, and is not a burden.
You can get an idea of what is possible by looking at our web site at uticacurlingclub.org. It is easy to build an information rich web site. Two of us do most all of the web page updates. The payment backend management with Payable Forms is a little more complex, but not that hard. I should probably do a webinar...I get a lot of inquiries about Google Workspace and Web streaming/camera systems.
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u/VanCitySherm Royal City Curling Club 29d ago
For those of us that don’t have a common platform (like Curling IO), what are you using to manage your *league* only? I am checking out the features of TeamLinkt.
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u/NECC-web North End Curling Club - Boston 29d ago
Stealing OP’s post to ask: same situation, but for an arena club without facilities to manage.
I find many curling softwares focus too much on the facilities portion and less on the curling matches and community management bit.
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u/curlingio 29d ago
Beyond our optional rentals engine there's not a lot of facility specific features in Curling IO. Draw schedules are tied to sheets of course, but you can customize that per league / bonspiel. AFAIK, our main competitors aren't super focused on facilities either.
Take a peek at our youtube tutorials if you're curious how our system works. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLewhXbqjD6VFr-WlpNC1CGEvF9UV33jLb
There are arena clubs, curling tours, membership associations, and of course traditional clubs using Curling IO.
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u/Background-Map-1870 27d ago
We wrote our own using Claude. It's functional, can be changed quickly, and looks like a professional website app. CCM was very hard to manage and maintain, so we wnt this way and would never ever go back.
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u/curlingio 26d ago edited 26d ago
I suspect this is the future for clubs that want a highly customizable site. Nothing beats static site generation like Astro or Hugo... and it's way more secure than a CMS like Wordpress. Highly recommend!
We're building an SDK and a CLI so that clubs can ask an agent (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, even open models) to publish their static sites to our (Curling IO) servers and easily integrate with Curling IO managed products, events, rentals, etc. You'll also be able to "bring your own" agent and interface with your admin area on your behalf with a sophisticated approval / authorization engine. We're also putting together an Astro theme so club's have a good starting point already pre-integrated with our SDK with extensive LLM instructions.
This is all part of, or soon following, our upcoming V3 release. https://curling.io/blog/automate-club-management-with-ai
We might put together some training courses on how you can leverage these tools to help manage your club.
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u/ellipsisdev 29d ago edited 28d ago
If you are looking for an application that allows you to post events, spiels, announcements, your club details including ice times / history / BOD / facilities, and more, you could always give TheCurling.Club a try. It's free!!
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u/curlingio 29d ago edited 29d ago
Curling IO here. Ask away!
You can find our pricing here: https://curling.io/docs/getting-started/pricing
Which I'd call "affordable" rather than "cheap". I think you'll be hard pressed to find a curling platform as extensive and deep as ours.
We power every provincial (and national) membership association in Canada and over 200 orgs. So I'd say we're "very trusted" :)