We have added in an exciting new feature - the Prep Sportswear Store!  We have partnered up with Prep Sportswear to provide you with a team store that allows you, your team, and anyone else to buy embroided and screenprinted apparel, gear, and other items with your team’s colors and logos.  The best part is that you can make money for your team!  You can make between 7% and 17% off every sale.  Stores are enabled by default, and you may turn them on or off in the “Website Features” section of the main options page in the admin area.

To edit your store, go to the “Prep Sportswear Store” page located in the “Static Content” menu (it must be enabled to do so) in the admin area.  From here you can preview your store and visit the Prep Sportswear page located on their site to edit the store colors, logos, and to add in your payment information to begin receiving checks for the money you can make on each sale.  Your Prep Sportswear username and password are the same as your current FreeTeams.net username and password.  If you change your FreeTeams.net password it will not change the Prep Sportswear password.

We hope you enjoy this great new feature and take advantage of it.  There are no minimum number of items to order, and thousands of items to choose from.

We have integrated with Digibug to provide you with high quality prints and other items using your photos.  You can order different sized prints and posters, shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, mousepads, and much more.  DigiBug will then create the products and ship them to you.

To order a print or other item using your photo, simply go to the photo galleries on your site.  Under each individual photo you will see a link to “More Info / Order Prints”.  From there, you can add the print to your shopping cart and then specify which product you’d like, whether a wallet-sized print or a large canvas recreation of the photo.

Currently all your photos are eligible for purchase. If you’d like to remove the ability for users to  purchase prints or other items from a gallery, simply edit the gallery in your admin area and make sure that “Allow Purchase of Prints” is unchecked.

You can also enable or disable this feature for all new galleries you create by checking or unchecking that option when you create a new gallery.

We hope you enjoy this service, please contact us if you have any question or concerns.

With this new addition, we have also changed our terms of service.  The title is the front page announcement for that change.  You can view the terms of service here.  The changes are the section at the bottom titled “Digibug Photo Printing”.  The basic premise is that when you enable users the ability to purchase photos, you are giving FreeTeams and Digibug permission to sell that image or photo (which you must own or have permission from the photographer to use and sell).  If you don’t want to give us permission, then just disable the ability for users to purchase.

Yes, we are making a little money off of the sale of photos, but not too much.  The reason we are doing this is that it allows us to keep the rest of the site free for you and your users.  We feel that services such as this along with a few small ads are a much better way to money to keep the site running than to charge you a fee for a team page.  It allows us to provide a quality service at an affordable price that is unobtrusive to you and your users.  The permission you give us only goes towards those items that Digibug sells.  We are not selling your images and photos to marketing firms, or using them in any other way.

We’ve had a few requests to make photo galleries a static option.  While we think there are cases where this is needed, we also think there’s still quite a number of times when photos are topical only for a particular season (team and player photos, specific game photos, etc.)  As a compromise, we’ve created a new feature in the galleries that will allow both.  There’s a new “Sticky” option that appears when you are creating or editing photo galleries in the admin area.  If you choose to make a photo gallery “Sticky,” it will show up in every season on your team’s website , regardless of which season it is associated with.  Also, to make them easy to edit, all the sticky galleries will show up in your gallery editor in the admin area, again regardless of which season they are associated with.

We hope this makes things a little easier and a little more flexible.

We have a new partner here at FreeTeams.net - Fun Photo Certificates.  You may have seen their ads on your site.  They are a company based in the UK that does business worldwide.  Here’s a little info from their website that sums up what they do:

Fun Photo Certificates Limited produce and deliver high quality photo certificates. Our certificates are suitable for everyone and are a great and original alternative to greeting cards.

You create the certificate online and we post it for you. Our certificates can be sent for any reason and you can write anything you want on your certificate.

Please check out their site at http://www.funphotocertificates.com/. You can preview various certificate in 6 easy steps, and again, they ship all over.

One thing I’d use them for that immediately popped into mind would be a great quality but inexpensive end of the year gift for my athletes, maybe with a team photo or an action shot.  I know I still have my little league and youth league soccer team photos from a couple of decades ago stored safely and really cherish them.

You can now delete as many of your own websites as your heart desires.  The best part?  You can now do this without having to deal with the (sometimes very slow) tech support department.  On the main options page of your admin area (the first page you see when you are editing a website, or go to “Options” -> “Main Options”,) you will now see a “Delete Website” field at the very bottom of the page.  All you have to do is click that little button and “poof,” all your data is no longer available.  Make sure you actually want to do this, as we may not be able to recover any data.  Our garbage (your old data) is taken out routinely, so don’t assume you can go dumpster-diving to find any old files like you can on your computer.  We’ll try to implement a backup system soon where you can download all your data just in case you’d like to have it for nostalgia’s sake or in case there’s a zombie attack and our servers don’t survive.

I’ve added in the ability to upload your own favicon - it’s a small detail but it helps you brand your webpage a little more to your liking.  Don’t know what a favicon is?  Look up in the URL bar (where you type in web addresses, like http://freeteams.net .)  To the left of the website’s address you should see a little icon.  The FreeTeams favicon is a combination of the letters F and T on a gray background.

You can now upload your own icon under the “Main Options” page.  It’s located at the very bottom of the page under the news feed settings.  You can upload either .ico, .gif, .jpg or .png files.  We highly suggest sizing your favicon to 16 pixels high by 16 pixels wide.   If you already have a logo or icon you want to convert or see how it would look as a favicon, you can create a favicon using this handy online generator at http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/.

We hope you enjoy this little extra addition.  If you’re still in the dark as to where the favicon is, I’ve included a screen shot of one of our demo pages, and I’ve uploaded a baseball as the favicon (it’s directly left of http://freeteams.net/baseballdemo/ ).

We’ve increased the amount of space you have to upload your files and photo galleries from 300 megabytes to 500 megabytes.  We’ve also updated our file manager a bit to look a little nicer.  You can also now create subdirectories in the file manager as well.  Enjoy!

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