In this feature recap, I want to give a shout out to my developer and programmer friends who hack during the week and drive, ride, kart or organize on nights and weekends. This episode is all for you as I'm going to detail a number of open source and API updates as well as a free Wordpress theme just for motorsports.

Joomla & Wordpress Plugins on GitHub

If you're using either of the very popular content management systems Wordpress or Joomla, we have long had plugins that will automatically display your MotorsportReg events on your own website. They were already open source but we've formalized it with a GitHub repository where anyone can browse, download or submit improvements.  Both are written in PHP and we already received our first pull request from Katja at Rocky Mountain Vintage Racing so hurry up and you can still be on the podium!

Check it out here: https://github.com/MotorsportReg

Free Wordpress Template for Clubs, Race tracks or Sanctioning Bodies

Is your website looking a little out of date? Are you still managing a static HTML page where only the webmaster can make updates? Would you like to just get a few new capabilities like growing your mailing lists and promoting social media?

This news will get an announcement all to itself but San Francisco Region SCCA has graciously allowed us to open source the Wordpress template that I helped create in my spare time.  It's a perfect starter kit for any motorsport organization who runs events and wants to keep their participants or members up to date.  When ready, you'll simply download the template to your Wordpress host of choice (we have recommendations), upload a few eye-catching photos and choose which tabs fit your particular programs.  We already include placeholders for track days, club racing, autocross, social, rallycross and more.

Why is SFR SCCA giving away this template after spending thousands of dollars having it designed and developed? Because they agree with my philosophy that there is more room for the sport to grow as a whole than there is in competing with each other for participants. Basically, a rising tide lifts all boats. If our websites look and work better then we are going to attract more people to the sport that we all love.

Keep an eye on https://github.com/MotorsportReg/wordpress-skeleton and we'll make an announcement here when you can download and fork it.

REST API Enhancements

We have been steadily expanding the scope of what you can accomplish with our REST API. More and more organizers are creating custom integrations and workflows that suit their particular programs. We've added the following new resources that can be manipulated programmatically:

• Credits - create, update or delete payment credits for participants

• Discounts - create, update or delete discount codes ($ or %)

• Member types - create them and add or remove them from participants

OAuth Authentication

OAuth is a major new addition that allows a third-party application to access MotorsportReg data with the permission of the user without ever exposing their username or password. It's the same technique used when you see "Sign In With Facebook" - the third party website never sees your Facebook email or password but can verify your identity securely.

For maximum compatibility, we've implemented three-legged OAuth 1.0a. Endpoints and notes are available in the API docs. When you access the API on behalf of a MotorsportReg user, hit the "/rest/me" endpoint for details on the current user.

Accessing the API with OAuth requires that you first register your application with us to obtain developer keys. Ping us to get set up - we're super excited to see what you create!

Developer Mailing List

Finally, the conversation doesn't end with this blog post. Anyone with a technical interest is invited to join our Google Group where we discuss and answer questions about our API.