Duration: 49:11
PART 1 — Analytical Summary 🚀
Context 💼
In this live demo, Thomas, a website expert at Odoo Belgium, walks through launching a full-featured sports club website using Odoo Website and the new Sports Club industry module. The scenario is practical: Odoo is opening a padel club on its new Belgian campus, and the site must enable court and coach bookings, online sales/rentals of gear, and member engagement (events, blogs, and subscriptions). Beyond design, the session showcases how website, eCommerce, bookings, CRM, and subscriptions come together in one integrated platform.
Core ideas & innovations 🧠
Thomas grounds the project in a simple web design methodology: define objectives, build a sitemap, create wireframes, then design. He then turns that plan into a working site directly in Odoo 19. Starting with the theme, he configures brand colors (with Odoo auto-generating five accessible palettes), pairs fonts (including Google Fonts), and styles buttons with padding and roundness to mirror the logo’s shapes. He sets a minimalist header and footer, uses a white-logo variant for contrast, and edits text color inline — a small but notable improvement in Odoo 19.
Design flourishes are built with out-of-the-box tools: Unsplash image integration, shaped images, and new connection shapes to visually blend sections. For a pro shop hero, he layers a background video with gradient color filters for readability, and animates elements with on-appearance and on-scroll effects. A “club happenings” band uses dynamic blocks to pull live Events and Blog posts. Throughout, he tunes layout density with padding, transform, and grid positioning — keeping it clean and on-brand.
Mobile is handled deliberately. He duplicates the hero for a mobile-first alternative, applies a filtered background image, and sets device-specific visibility so the desktop and mobile banners render independently. The takeaway: responsive design in Odoo can be curated per device without code.
Functionally, the Sports Club vertical ties everything together. Courts are modeled as resources in Appointments, so visitors can book a court online. Coaching sessions are separate appointment types; bookings can be assigned to a coach (e.g., “Tony”) and sync with Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook. The eCommerce portion supports both selling and rental — Thomas creates a rentable racket with pricing per period, adds it to the cart, and checks out alongside court and coaching bookings. For memberships, a web form creates a CRM opportunity; from there, a quotation is generated and converted into a Subscription with yearly renewal and automated invoicing. Finally, publishing is handled centrally via the site’s page list.
The Q&A adds nuance. Odoo currently doesn’t auto-synchronize times across multiple bookings (e.g., aligning a court slot with a coach). Custom domains are supported (with the first year free on subscription). You can sell subscriptions via eCommerce, embed 3D or other rich media via the Code snippet (iframe), use the Configurator to spin up prebuilt pages by industry, add product-level terms and conditions, and save custom-designed snippets as reusable building blocks. ⚙️
Impact & takeaways 💬
This demo shows how a sports club can launch a production-ready site — design, bookings, rentals, membership, and content — in one cohesive system. Odoo reduces context-switching: the same platform handles branding, content, scheduling, payments, CRM, and renewals. The design layer is approachable yet flexible, with generative palettes, shape tools, dynamic content blocks, and per-device editing. On the operations side, the Appointments, Rental, eCommerce, CRM, and Subscriptions apps work in concert, minimizing integration overhead.
Two practical notes temper the enthusiasm. First, aligning multi-resource bookings (e.g., coach + court time matching) is not automated and remains user-managed. Second, while the configurator accelerates setup, deep customization still benefits from thoughtful wireframing and content planning. Overall, the session exemplifies Odoo’s “integrated but simple” ethos — fast from idea to live site, with room to scale features as the club grows.
PART 2 — Viewpoint: Odoo Perspective
Disclaimer: AI-generated creative perspective inspired by Odoo's vision.
What I love here is the continuity from intent to execution. You start with goals and a wireframe, and in the same environment you shape identity, content, bookings, and revenue streams. That’s our vision for Odoo: remove the seams so small teams can build big experiences — without juggling a dozen tools.
Sports clubs are a perfect illustration. The same platform that designs the website also runs rentals, appointments, subscriptions, and the back office. When the community can save building blocks, tune mobile experiences, and stay on-brand in a few clicks, we’re closer to software that feels invisible — and that’s when people focus on delivering great experiences, not wrestling with systems.
PART 3 — Viewpoint: Competitors (SAP / Microsoft / Others)
Disclaimer: AI-generated fictional commentary. Not an official corporate statement.
Odoo’s speed from concept to live site is impressive, particularly for SMB clubs. The UX coherence — theme, content, bookings, eCommerce, CRM, and subscriptions — lowers total cost of ownership. For organizations where digital presence, rentals, and coaching need to come online quickly, that’s compelling differentiation.
For larger enterprises, there are open questions: multi-resource scheduling constraints (coach + court alignment), compliance at scale (privacy, payment, audit trails), high-volume performance, and deeper governance (segregation of duties, approvals). Those are solvable, but they require rigor. The UX-led approach is strong — the challenge will be extending the same simplicity to more complex scenarios while maintaining robustness and compliance.
Disclaimer: This article contains AI-generated summaries and fictionalized commentaries for illustrative purposes. Viewpoints labeled as "Odoo Perspective" or "Competitors" are simulated and do not represent any real statements or positions. All product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.