Our own product — clubs, schools and venues
Joinovo — administration for clubs, schools and venues
What began as a tool for one tennis club now also carries language schools and dance studios. What made that possible is not a longer feature list but a tenant boundary that holds everywhere.
The brief
An administration platform for organisations rarely fails on a feature and almost always on the boundary between them: one person belongs to several organisations, with a different role in each, and none may ever see another's data. On top of that, a tennis club and a language school need the same building blocks and a different vocabulary.
The solution
Each organisation gets its own subdomain; the tenant is read from the host in nginx and passed on as a header, so no route has to carry it. Membership is a table of its own with a role per organisation, and each tenant switches its modules on individually.
The outcome
One application carries sports clubs, language schools and dance studios without becoming a separate edition for each kind.
A closer look
The difference between an application for one club and a platform for many is not a question of the feature list. It lies in where the boundary between two organisations is drawn, and how often somebody has to draw it. Drawn afresh in every query, it is eventually forgotten somewhere — and that is the one mistake a platform like this cannot make.
In Joinovo it therefore sits in front of the application. Each organisation has its own subdomain, the tenant is read from the host in the web server and passed on as a header, and the routes are constrained on it. No path carries an organisation identifier, so no path can lose one. Membership is a table of its own: one person, several organisations, a role in each — rather than an account per club.
On top of that, the feature set is switchable per tenant, and that is precisely what carried the platform beyond where it came from. It started as a tool for consumption and payment in a tennis club; today it also runs course enrolment, scheduling and attendance for a language school. Membership cards and visits are scanned as QR codes, and billing keeps running in the background.