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.