About The Project

Our Aim

Every institution has multiple student clubs, each aspiring to have their own digital presence. A key component of any digital presence is a centralized hub that expresses the vision and dash of the club.

The scale and scope of this hub varies with the requirements of the club/chapter and their community. However, there are challenges from both financial and human resource perspectives that constrain the club from building this on their own.

Hence, mitblr.club aims to provide student communities with the relevant technologies to kickstart their own social space on the internet.

Our Solution

The problem we’re trying to address is a flexible one, creating the need for a dynamic solution. Each club has a requirement based on their own scale and budget. To ensure the solution we offer is one that can be of assistance to all clubs, we have designed a three-tier system.

Tier 1: Custom Domain

We are offering a domain of the form {club_name}.mitblr.club, to each club in the college, free of cost. The objective of this tier is to relieve clubs from using their own budget for building their digital presence, enabling them to use it for events and projects as they wish.

If clubs/chapters are planning to host their own sites and require web analytics and/or image optimization, we recommend having their own account on a relevant hosting platform and ask us for a redirect domain. For more information, see Technical Information.

Tier 2: "Linked List" System

This tier is for clubs/chapters that do not require a fully-fledged website, but could benefit from a system like Linktree that has all their links in one place.

Our *cough* "Linked List" project allows student clubs to have a central hub for all their social media handles, GitHub organisations, and any other link that is relevant to the club in a visual format that speaks about the club’s vision and goals.

A working demo of this tier can be found here.

Tier 3: Fully Custom Template

This tier is a fully-fledged, mobile responsive website template (with dark mode!) that can be used by clubs that do not have the time or resources to build their own site.

The site also has pages for the club's blogs and events to create a sense of community. Here, the logistics/operations team of the club can add, delete, order and even set featured events from where students can directly access the registration forms.

All content is edited and managed on Notion, so that the content is displayed on the site just as expected by the core committee. Since the platform is based on a no-code approach, editing content doesn't require touching a single line of HTML and all site configuration is done through simple JSON files.

A working demo of this tier can be found here.

Clubs can choose the tier of their choice based on their requirements. Each tier comes with all products that are mentioned in the lower tiers as well. For instance, Tier 2 also comes with the domain given by Tier 1.

Working with Student Welfare

mitblr.club works directly in unison with the Student Welfare of MIT Bengaluru - thus mandating that all clubs/chapters must pick one of the tiers offered. This is to ensure uniform domain names, allowing students to easily visit the website of the club of their choice.

Technical Information

• All websites have been built using Next.JS, A React framework with Tailwind CSS, Contentlayer, and shadcn/ui components.
• We host our Tier 2 and Tier 3 sites on Vercel's Pro Plan, which allows for secure team collaboration and higher scalability. Since their image optimization feature is still limited in this plan, it is reserved for use on mitblr.club's own sites.
• All content for events and blogs is handled through Notion's "Database Tables", which hold the page content and all its corresponding attributes. Each club/chapter can freely maintain admin access and hold rights to their own content.
• We fetch data from Notion using Splitbee's notion-api-worker, which is then displayed using their lightweight react-notion library.
• All of our projects are open-source, and the source code is available on our GitHub organization.