ClubWheel

ClubWheel: Website Accelerator for Rotary Clubs

Everything a Rotary club website needs, ready out of the box: the board of directors, committees, service projects, events, Rotary years, and a members-only area with protected documents. Free, open source, and built for volunteers rather than for webmasters.

A club website is the same problem, solved from scratch every time

Every Rotary club needs the same pages, and almost every club builds them by hand: a board that has to be retyped each July, a committee list that goes stale, projects buried where nobody finds them, and documents sent by email because there is nowhere safe to put them.

ClubWheel models the club instead of the pages. Appointments belong to a Rotary year, so last year’s board is still there when this year’s takes over. Committees follow those appointments and rotate by themselves every 1 July. Documents live in a private store and reach only the members entitled to them. Nothing has to be retyped when the year turns.

Two downloads, and you choose how much you use

The ClubWheel plugin holds the club’s structure and its data: board, committees, projects, events, Rotary years, people, the members-only area, protected documents with a download log, and the contact and membership forms. Everything is available as blocks, shortcodes, a REST API and a PHP API, so it works with any theme or page builder.

The ClubWheel theme draws a complete club website around it: homepage, board and committees, projects, events, the club’s history, membership, sponsors and contact. More than fifty designs, a header and footer that read the club’s own settings, and no page builder required.

Either can be used on its own. Install the plugin, open Site setup, and tick the pages to create: they are built from the theme’s designs, written in the language of the site, and they are ordinary pages from that moment on.

What it does

  • The board of directors, composed for each Rotary year from real appointment records. Past boards stay available for ever.
  • Committees, whose composition follows the appointments of each Rotary year and rotates by itself every 1 July.
  • Service projects with multilingual descriptions, contributions tracked in money, goods and volunteer hours, partner organizations, and an optional import from Rotary’s Service Project Center.
  • Events with types, venues, and public or members-only visibility.
  • Rotary years as a first-class idea that classifies everything else.
  • A members-only area: member accounts and roles, a login page on the club’s own site, page protection that sub-pages inherit, and a personal page for each member.
  • Protected documents in a private store, served only through an authenticated link, with per-committee access groups and a download log.
  • Roster import from the My Rotary club export in any language, matched by member ID, previewed before anything is written, and never deleting anybody.
  • Contact and membership forms that deliver to the club’s own address and store nothing.
  • Privacy tools: personal-data export and erasure through the standard WordPress screens.

Built to be handed over

A club website usually outlives the person who built it, so ClubWheel is written for the volunteer who inherits it rather than the one who starts it.

  • Five languages, complete. English, Italian, Spanish, French and German, each using Rotary’s own terminology in that language rather than a literal translation. Compatible with Polylang, WPML and TranslatePress.
  • No lock-in. The plugin owns the data and the theme owns the presentation. Change theme, change builder, or use none: the club’s records stay where they are.
  • Nothing disappears behind your back. Deactivating removes nothing, and uninstalling removes data only if you explicitly asked for it in the settings.
  • Free, and free of upsell. GPL-licensed, no paid tier, no add-on to unlock, nothing to subscribe to.

Requirements: the plugin needs WordPress 6.7 and PHP 8.0 or later; the theme needs WordPress 7.0 and PHP 7.4 or later. Both are released under the GNU General Public License v2 or later.

Who makes it

ClubWheel is built and maintained by Stefano De Luca at Evodevo srl, a company in Rome, Italy working on artificial intelligence, big data and social insight. Evodevo has a standing commitment to the nonprofit sector, to open innovation and to corporate social responsibility, and ClubWheel is part of it: free software for volunteer clubs that rarely have a budget for a website, with no upsell attached.

Questions, bug reports and contributions are welcome at info@evodevo.it.

Independence

ClubWheel is an independent project by Evodevo srl. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed by Rotary International.

Who makes it

ClubWheel is built and maintained by Stefano De Luca at Evodevo srl, a company in Rome, Italy working on artificial intelligence, big data and social insight. Stefano, one of Evodevo’s owners, is himself a Rotarian: ClubWheel is designed from inside a club rather than for one, which is why it models Rotary years, classifications and committee rotation the way club life actually works.

The plugin and the theme are part of Evodevo’s commitment to the nonprofit sector, alongside its work on open innovation and corporate social responsibility. Both are given away under the GPL, for volunteer organizations that rarely have a budget for a website, with no paid tier and no upsell attached.

Questions, bug reports and contributions are welcome at info@evodevo.it.

“Rotary”, “Rotary Club” and the Rotary emblem are trademarks of Rotary International, used here only to describe what this software is for. ClubWheel deliberately ships none of Rotary’s licensed brand assets: a club is entitled to download the official logos and materials from the Rotary Brand Center and use them on its own site.