New Players

Registration is for our existing players, coaches and their supporting friends and family.  If you are a new player wanting to join us, please contact the relevant Year Group Manager to check for availability.

Existing Players

We ask all our players and coaches to register their details with us, and maintain these on an annual basis.  This provides us with contact details, and information that we may need for tournament entry forms.  It also allows you to provide us with any medical information that you think we should be aware of.  

You can find the registration form from the 'Register' menu item at the top of our website  or by clicking here.  

Please fill in this registration form as prompted.

We also allow friends and family to register themselves as 'supporters'.  Once approved, it allows them access to more features on this website.

If you are a parent or carer, and are registering a player, please enter the player's name and details, rather than your own.  The email address you provide will be used to identify this web account.  However, if we need to contact you as a parent, we will use the one listed under 'Contact Email', which you will find further down the form.  So if your Fox has their own email address (or their school one) you can use this as the Web Account email.  If you have more than one child, you can register all your children under the same (ie your) email address if you wish.  

As the end of this registration, you will be asked to read and agree to our Code of Conduct.  You might like to do read this first.

Once you have registered, we will need to approve your registration.  You will then be granted access to your Year pages.  If you are a coach, for example, you will find a 'Coaches' tab appears on the menu.

League Registration and Player ID Cards

If your Fox is in a year group who are playing in organised leagues, that league may require us to register players.  We will use the information you provide here to complete this registration, and so it is important that you keep it up to date.  This includes the use of photographs used for league ID cards.  If you want more information about this, please contact our Club Welfare Officer.

You will find the Player Photo on the 'Personal' tab.  Note that this is not the same as the Avatar (which is the small round photo on your profile that other logged-in people will see), although by all means, upload the same image.

The photograph needs to be passport-style. That is, head and shoulders, forward facing, a neutral expression and on a plain (preferably light) background. One taken with a smartphone is fine. Here's an example:

Updating your Profile

It is important that you keep your registered data up to date.  We may use this if we need to contact you in an emergency.  You can update your data from your Profile page which is displayed when to log in.  You can also get to your profile page by clicking on your name in the top right corner, or clicking here. At the top of the profile, you will see an Edit option.

Why not give yourself an Avatar (you can select one of the in-built ones, or you can upload an image), and a Profile Backdrop, rather than the plain purple one - be creative!    

We now have a website! www.westburyparkfoxes.co.uk

Purpose

Threefold really:

1. To act as a public-front end to our club. Who are we?, etc.
2. To provide a means for formal registration of players
3. And a forum to share information within the club – between teams, coaches, etc.

Registration

For a number of years, we’ve known that we want a more formal process of registering our players that is consistent throughout the club. Last year we ran a pilot with some year groups which showed that parents were happy to comply, but what we didn’t really want was ‘another system’.

Using the registration process to also provide access to parts of the website that are applicable to that user gives us an added benefit.  Our website is about young people, and we clearly need to protect them. This means that most of the website is hidden behind a login....

The registration process is all carried out online. Players, coaches and parents (known as ‘supporters’) can register. For younger players, a parent would complete this registration on their behalf. Older Foxes can register themselves.

Once the online form has been completed, the registration needs verifying (by a ‘human’), to ensure that the applicant is bona fide. Only then is access to the website granted.

User access is via a username (chosen at registration) and password. All the player’s details captured at registration can be modified by that user.

Website content

This can gain arms and legs as we see fit and think of new ideas. Here are some ideas:

• General stuff: Who are we?; Contact a Coach, etc.; Forthcoming events; News
• Year Group pages: Fixture List; Photo Gallery; Match Reports
• Coaches: Training ideas; Maps to opponents’ grounds; Player List (automated from registrations)
• Managers: Administration stuff, and things that our managers need.

The idea is that we encourage a community of contributors – and this includes Foxes. Why not encourage them to write a Match Report? As you will see below, the platform we have used makes this easy.

Techie stuff

The website is built on the Joomla! platform. There are a number of alternatives, but this seemed to fit the bill. The prime benefits are the platform is free, and open source. In other words, we haven’t had to buy the software, and we have access to the code, and can tweak it if we feel geeky enough.
Because of the above, there is now a very large number of websites that are built on Joomla!, including some surprisingly big commercial ones. There is a big developer community who succeed by offering ‘add-ons’ for free, and charge for support. Or you can find your own geek, or don’t stray too far from the core Joomla! core.

It is hosted on a server in the UK (Hertfordshire), owned by LCN. We pay an annual fee for this. It is completely portable, and if we find a better deal (cost and/or service) somewhere else, we can move this in a few hours. But they have been very helpful both times I’ve needed to contact them.
The biggest issue is likely to be performance. We have a basic package, which means our ‘server’ will be shared by numerous others. Let’s see....

A bit more on ‘Why Joomla!?’

Joomla! is often called a ‘content management system’, or CMS. What this really means is that you can use the website itself to add content. This takes us away from a website that differentiates between webmasters and viewers, and allows ‘viewers’ to add content, as long as they have permission.

To make this work, a CMS needs a robust and flexible access control mechanism. Joomla!’s is certainly this, and that’s good for us too. It means we can easily make content available to coaches, or year groups, or the public, etc. etc. We can add new groups at anytime, and assign users to multiple groups.
Using this access control functionality, we can make the website look as simple or as complex as we like, to different user groups.

It does mean, though, that you need proper user management with logins, passwords, forgotten passwords, etc. Of course Joomla! has all this, and that’s exactly what we want anyway, to make sure that we control who has access to the interesting parts of our site.