Seven races, one place to enter them

The organiser ran the races on an old Drupal site, with registrations, results, the athlete history and the live leaderboard each living somewhere else.

The new platform puts all of it in one place the secretariat runs itself: the public site, entries and payment, approvals and bib numbers, start lists for the timing company, results with splits and a live page, the registry since 2004, finisher certificates as PDF, news, photos, sponsors and a newsletter. Greek first, English alongside, and every old URL redirects to its new page.

The form is built per edition from its own config and saved on the device as the athlete types, so a dropped connection loses nothing.

At checkout the place is held for fifteen minutes and the price is computed on the server, in SQL, never taken from the browser. Every checkout gets its own merchant reference, and the bank's callback is signed and idempotent, so a repeated or replayed callback can't pay twice or confirm a place that was never held.

Capacity, bib uniqueness and duplicate entries are enforced by Postgres itself, not by application code that two requests arriving together could both slip past. Every constraint and SQL function has its own database test.

Before summer registrations open, a load test fires a thousand checkouts at the same moment. The race fills to exactly its capacity, and not one place more.

About 13,000 athletes and 21,000 results came over from the old system and the organiser's timing archives. The old system had often created several records for the same person, so duplicates with the same name, birth date and sex are merged, and anything uncertain lands on a review screen for the secretariat instead of being guessed.

Each athlete gets a page with every result since 2004, and a finisher can download a certificate for any race they completed.

Staff sign in with a code sent to their email, with admin and secretariat roles. They open and close registrations by date, set fees and add-ons, approve entries with registry matches suggested and the next bib number filled in, export start lists for the timing company, import teams from Excel, and manage news, race pages, sponsors, photos and the newsletter.

Every change goes to an audit log, so the question of who changed what always has an answer.

Participant lists show only the columns each athlete consented to, and every consent is stored with the exact version of the text they agreed to. Nothing non-essential loads before cookie consent, and no secret ever reaches the browser.

Athlete accounts are optional and never required to register: an emailed code or a password shows your entries, your results since 2004 and your stats, and fills in the form for the next race.