Free Teams Web Log

I have completed work on the online form system. If you’re curious, this allows you to add a number of questions to a form page that allows people to submit answers. Common uses for forms such as these include recruiting forms, contact us forms, online registration for your team or league, etc. It is marked as Beta because I haven’t been able to test it thoroughly, and some extra features need to be finished.   In any case, it has a great deal of features that are ready to go, and I welcome you to add them to your site - if you find any issues, please let me know.

After creating a form, you can specify the introduction, as well as what user’s see when they successfully complete a form. When users successfully complete a form, they and the owners and administrators of your site will be emailed a copy of the form for your records. The excitement doesn’t stop there though. Along with an email, all the form data gets saved to your administration panel, allowing you to view all the submissions at once. Along with viewing, you can edit any submission’s data in place, and export your data to a CSV file, which you can view and manipulate in your favorite spreadsheet program, such as Excel. This is another area where more features will be added. Some upcoming features will include sorting your submissions, running reports and searching your submissions. You can create unlimited forms, arrange them in the order you want in your main menu, and activate and deactivate old forms.

The deactivation feature is something that will be useful if you wish to save your form data. For instance, you may have a fall registration each year. After the year is over, you can deactivate the fall registration and create a new fall registration (we have a handy form copy feature that will copy all form inputs from an old form to a new form, saving you time). All the data for the old fall registration will be saved for future access. If you don’t need it anymore, you can also completely delete the form and all its data. be careful about this though, as your data cannot be recovered once it is deleted. In order to delete a form, you will need to first deactivate it. It will then show up in the deactivated forms list, where you are able to delete it.

We hope you find this feature useful, and again, if you find any bugs please let me know. Some unrelated features I am currently working on include more privacy features, email notification when you have new user associations, and an online store.

I have added in new privacy settings for the Schedule and Photo Galleries.  By default these are viewable by anyone, but if you would like to restrict these pages, you can edit the settings in your admin area.  Simply visit the “Privacy Settings” page in the “Options” menu and you can set what users can view these sections.

Look for more privacy settings in the coming weeks, letting you set privacy for individual Photo Galleries, Custom Pages, News Stories and other website features.

So you may have noticed something new in the admin area - we are in the process of changing our drag & drop sorting script for such features as our Officers, Team Types, Menu Links & Custom Pages. This will hopefully make things a bit less cumbersome for you by reducing the number of actions you have to perform when saving certain items. We have started with our Team Types feature and the Menu Links feature.

Along with the switch, we have upgaded some of our javascript libraries to smaller and more powerful packages and have started compressing more of our files, which for you means less code to download and hopefully a much faster website than you are used to.

If you have any feedback on the new drag and drop script, please let me know in the FreeTeams Forums

Freeteams.net has grown by leaps and bounds since opening our doors in June of 2007. As of writing more than 1,040 users have signed up and almost 800 teams have signed up. More than half of those teams have been active in the past 3 months.

When we added the user association feature, a new issue arose - namely that of notifications. As it stands now, you have to log in and check your website to see if you have any new users to approve. We will be adding in email notifications for admins when you have a new user to aprove, as well as for users - for example, when your team posts a new news story or new photos. You will of course will be able to turn these notifications on and off at the team and user level. In any case, this would amount to hundreds, and eventually thousands of emails being processed each day, which we could not do with our old server.

While our previous host is a good company to use for hosting new or small sites, it isn’t so good at keeping up with sites as they grow like FreeTeams has. As well, they have had a few serious issues regarding hardware failures. One such failure occurred Friday February 8th and wasn’t fixed until mid-day Saturday February 9th. This is no fly-by-night company either - they host more than half a million domains. In any case, I decided to purchase some more robust server space which will allow us to add in new features (such as the email notification system, and hopefully a SMS - text message notification system as well) that wouldn’t have been possible with our old host due to certain limits they imposed. Along with these new features, we are no longer sharing our server space with other sites, so hopefully the service should be quicker and more responsive when you’re browsing and editing your team pages.

I moved the server late last night; hopefully there wasn’t much downtime for you all. If you encounter any bugs with your website, please let me know ASAP as a server move is a pretty serious undertaking and there may have been a bug here or there that got introduced. I did as much testing as I could, but I’m only one man and I’m certainly not perfect.

Enjoy the new server.

Having your team’s information and on-field exploits in a professional looking website can be exciting. Sometimes though, having your or your child’s information displayed on the web for anyone to view can be a scary thought - and justifiably so. Well worry no more! We have expanded our privacy settings to include your team’s roster and player bios.

Currently, every team’s roster and bios are set to be shown to the general public and any user associated with your team. You can now change this so that your roster or bios show up to only the users you wish to show. You can leave them viewable by anyone, or you can restrict them to specific users who are associated with your team. The roster and bio are independent, so you can display your roster to the public, while restricting player bios, which may include more personal information, to users you trust.

To change these settings, simply go to the Privacy Settings page in your team’s administration area and check or uncheck which users you wish to give access to. This page is accessible through the Options menu.

After much hoopla and fanfare, the Forum system is now active for your team’s website, which you can enable or disable from your administration panel. All forum, thread and post creation happens on the public-facing part of your team’s website. Just visit your team’s page and click on the”Forums” link in your left hand menu. Depending upon the privacy settings you have set up in your administration panel, users can create forums, threads within forums, and replies to posts within threads. Currently only website owners can delete threads and forums. Other users can only delete posts they have created.

In order to post, a user must have a FreeTeams accoung and be logged in and associated with your team.  You must visit your Privacy Settings page in the administration panel to enable team-user associations if you have not done so already.  To limit spam and give you more control over your content, anonymous posting is not allowed.

Owners have full control over the forums, and can delete any post, thread, or forum, regardless of who created it. Users can enter standard Bulletin Board Code to link to pictures, URLs, and include a few other formatting options. Here is a handy BBCode guide if you would like more information.

Please let me know if you find anything that looks like it shouldn’t be there, or if anything isn’t working as it should. I may add in some other message board features later, like moving threads to different forums, editing forum titles and thread titles, sticky threads, saving threads into a favorites section, etc. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the FreeTeams Forums

YOU MUST VISIT YOUR PRIVACY SETTINGS PAGE IN YOUR ADMINISTRATION PANEL BEFORE ANY ASSOCIATION FEATURES ARE ENABLED. Even though caps lock is obviously cruise control for awesome, I apologize for the previous sentence. I wanted it to stand out though.

You may have noticed a small menu bar at the top of your team’s website. This is the beginning of the community interaction I have been promising for the past few months. What??? All that waiting and anticipation (well, from at least one person I know, I’m not sure about the rest of you) for a tiny little menu bar at the top of your team’s website?

Well, yes. But that little bar represents so much more (and not just all the time I spent building the foundation for it either). When you are logged in (you can get a free FreeTeams account at our handy Sign Up Page) and are viewing your team’s website, you will see how you are associated with your team over at the right-hand side of that menu bar. If you have any associations, they will be listed. You will also see a link to join that team or add another association. Currently you can join as a Player, Fan, Coach, Alumni, Parent, or Booster. If you created the website, you will see another association: Owner. We will be adding in another one shortly (Admin) to allow other users the ability to edit your website. If you are associated with the team in more than one capacity, fret not, for you can join a team under multiple associations.

“Great! I joined a team. What do I get to do now?” NOTHING!!!! No, I’m serious. Currently there are no features set up to take advantage of this new concept in team management. However, that message board system I promised a while back? It’s nearly ready. I spent most of my Thanksgiving building and testing it, and it is oh so close to being done. I am hoping to have it completed and launched the first weekend in December. I’ll have another post for my 5 readers when it is ready.

“Hey, I don’t think that guy is actually associated with my team!” Website Owners: You may notice a new notice area in your main options page when you first open up your administration panel. It has a brief overview of your user associations, alerts in case you have any new associations to approve, and links to your member list and privacy settings. You can set up associations in a few ways. You can enable or disable individual associations, and you can auto-approve associations, or require them to be reviewed by an owner or an admin before the association is approved. You will also see the settings for the upcoming Message Boards. We will include other privacy settings on this page as we introduce new features.

The members page gives you a nice and organized list of all the users who have joined your team. You may approve and deny associations from this page if you have that setting enabled, and you can remove unwanted associations from this page as well.

Photo Gallery Updates

We have made the photo gallery a bit easier to browse.  Until now, you may have noticed if you uploaded very large images, they stretched the slideshow out of proportion and made it hard to view. We are now automatically resizing your uploaded images to a much easier to view resolution, which in turn dramatically speeds up loading time in between pictures. Don’t worry though, your original size images are still saved, which you can view by visit ing the “Image Info” link below the image in your gallery and clicking to see the original picture.

Sorry for the long-winded post. I’ll have another when the Message Boards are ready. If you have any questions about our new features, please send me a message through our Contact Us Page or in our Forums section.

In case you didn’t notice, I have updated the look and feel of the home page area for Free Teams. This is the second in a series of updates to Free Teams. The first was an updated front page feed which includes listing new photo albums as well as your news stories on the front page of your team’s website (if you have those features enabled). It will include any newly created photo albums along with your news stories, and will display a few random images from the album. We will be adding a few more items to the front page feed as well, such as game updates or changes, roster updates, etc.

In the meantime, next up in development is our user management and forums system. These are fairly close to completion, and when I can find some extra minutes here and there between my regular jobs, I will be finishing them up and releasing them into the wild. Upon your approval, users will be able to to join your team as a player, parent, coach and alumni to name a few of the relationships. From there, you can set permissions and allow certain groups to view or post to your message boards, which will be separated into categories of your choosing. I will post more information when these features go live, so look for them in the coming weeks.

So in short for the look and feel, I was going for something a bit a more refined and less busy looking in the attempt to give users a better first impression that the business and product is solidly built and worth trying out. If you have any comments about the new site, positive or negative, please let me know in our forums. You can view the thread discussing this post at: Free Teams Forums: New Look & Feel

If you use Internet Explorer 6 or 7, you may have noticed a few bugs with the color picker we use in the style section of the administration panel.  Well fret no more - earlier this evening I updated the color picker and all seemed well when I tested the picker in the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 6
• Internet Explorer 7
• Firefox 2
• Opera 9
• Safari 3 (for Windows)

If you encounter any new bugs with the color picker, please post them in the forum thread entitled ‘Color Picker Issues’

Free Teams is based in sunny Southern California, but we are trying to develop an international product that spans cultures and countries. We have been advertising in countries with a large English speaking population, and will hopefully get the Administration Panel and team websites translated in the future to reach an even larger population across the globe.

That being said, there are differences that need to be addressed before we go that far. The first we have tackled is Date Formatting. In the United States, it is common to see dates formatted as MM/DD/YYYY, whereas a few users have told me that in Europe it is more common to format dates as DD/MM/YYYY. Because of this, we have created an option for you to define how your dates show up on your team’s website. You can find this option on the Team & Site Settings page in the Options menu in the Administration Panel. I think we have found all the pages on the team sites where an ambiguous date is shown, but if you come across a page where it is not set correctly, please let me know.

You have probably noticed that the dates in the administration panel are in one format. That is YYYY-MM-DD (or YYYY/MM/DD). This is because computers use this format (along with the Japanese from what I’m told), as it is easier to sort by. We will continue to use this format in the Administration Panel independently of what you have set for your team’s Date Format.

I am sure there are a few other things on the site that differ dependent upon your location, but unfortunately I do not know what these are (and have little extra time to do research on them). So if you come across something that needs to be added to the Locale Settings, please let me know. Thanks.