Through our countless internal discussions as we were designing eatsleepride, we decided that there were a few different tools that we wanted to include in order to provide users with the ability to organize themselves in any number of different ways. We feel that it’s an important part of a community that aims to cater to all different types of riders from all different areas.

The first of these tools is what we are broadly calling “Events”, at least for now. Essentially an integrated calendar that can be used for anything tied to a date, which has endless uses such as planning a group ride, meet-up, race, swap meet, virtual gathering, etc…

So what can be done with events? Once logged in, any user can create an event. The first step is to enter the basic details of your event: a name for the event, add a start day / time and end day / time and a description. You can decide to make it public (anyone can view and join the event) or private (the creator of the event must approve users to join). The next step, which is optional but definitely quite useful, is to add other content to your event. The other content can be anything else from the site, such as photos, but we the thing we’re more excited about is the ability to add a route to your event. What’s the deal with these routes you ask? I’ll be covering routes off in a future post, but imagine you’re planning an event that’s a group ride and you’ve got a route mapped out that you want to follow for the ride – you can easily add a map of this to your event for everyone to see. Once you’ve added whatever you need to add to your event, you come to the third step, once again optional, which is simply to invite your friends.

If you’re not into creating your own events, you can browse all of the events created by other users. There’s a nice big calendar to browse by, or just scroll through a list. To help you discover events there’s a few simple views that will show you events your friends are attending or ones that we think you might be interested in based on your location, what bikes you ride, what groups you have joined, etc. There’s also a view just for you to quickly manage the events you’ve indicated you’re planning to attend.

Groups is another feature to help users get organized. Groups functions very much like events, except there is no date detail attached to a group. Otherwise, anyone can create one, make it public or private, add other content to it and invite your friends to join. As much as we are advocates for bikers from all different areas and segments of the sport coming together for big group hugs, we also know that it’s only natural for like-minded riders to want to interact within their own groups and we hope we’ve provided the right functionality to enable this.

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