OBGN 2027

OBGN 2027 is the website for the 2027 Open Belgian Gliding Nationals, a week-long gliding competition flown from Keiheuvel in July 2027. The organisers needed one place where a pilot can find out what the competition is, decide to take part, register, see who else is coming, and follow the results during the competition week. It had to work for Belgian regulars and foreign first-timers alike, so it is published in Dutch, French and English.

Context

Competition sites of this kind are usually a static page plus a registration form on an external platform, and the organisers end up answering the same questions by e-mail. The brief was the opposite: everything a pilot needs to commit, and everything the organisers need to run the entries, inside one site they can maintain themselves without touching code.

Approach

Nothing about the edition is hardcoded. Dates, airfield, classes, number of places and fees live in the database and are edited in a Dutch admin area. Whatever the organisers have not filled in yet is shown as "to be announced". The same applies to the information texts, in all three languages, and to the photographs: the admin shows the public pages in a visual editor where the text and photo areas are highlighted and edited in place.

Registration follows the calendar. Before the opening date the site offers a calendar file, while open it shows a three-step entry form, and after the deadline it points to the participants list. There are 55 places in total. An entry gets a place at once while places remain, otherwise it joins a single waiting list across the classes. A place becomes final once the entry fee is paid within the payment deadline. A nightly job hands unpaid places to the next pilot in line and mails everyone involved. Each pilot has a private status page with their position, the payment instructions and a photo they can upload themselves.

During the competition the home page changes. Once the organisers link each class to its Soaring Spot results, the site reads the published tasks and scores, draws today's task to scale from the turnpoints, and shows day scores and overall standings per class, refreshed every few minutes. Soaring Spot remains the source of truth; the site only presents it.

The design is built around the competition's own logo, redrawn as an SVG with the Belgian colours pouring out as water ballast, and animated once on arrival. The look is a sunlit palette, one orange accent and generous photo heads, with dark mode following the system. Every public page passes WCAG 2.1 AA in both colour schemes, carries titles, canonical addresses and language alternates for search engines, and ships an event schema for rich results. A map of the airspace released for the competition, drawn from openAIP data, serves as a marketing piece on the information page.

The stack is Next.js with the App Router, React, TypeScript and plain CSS, Neon Postgres for the data, Vercel Blob for documents and photos, Resend for the transactional mail, all hosted on Vercel.

Outcome

The organisers run the whole edition from the admin: entries, places, documents, texts, photographs, sponsors and their own accounts. Pilots register and follow their entry without a single e-mail to the organisers. The site is ready for the 2027 edition and will carry the live tasks and standings during the competition week in July 2027.