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.

I launched Free Teams in the middle of June to very little fanfare. Free Teams is not a large corporation or backed by a lot of money or developers. This is my own personal project and I do all the work, from running all the Board Meetings to sweeping up the mailroom floor. That being said, the software is in good shape, and as of writing I am ironing out a few remaining bugs and adding a few new features. I have a general idea of where I’d like to take the site, but the road map is in no way set in stone, and I am always open to suggestions for features.

The largest ‘upcoming feature’ that I have planned for the software is to incorporate social networking across sports and teams. You will see that it is built into the software when you log in and go to your account. You are shown each website you are associated with and your relationship to that site. For now, that relationship is limited to ‘owner’. As I extend the functionality, we will allow users to apply to various teams as ‘players’, ‘parents’, ‘alumni’ ‘boosters’, ‘coaches’, etc. By using privacy settings, teams can show their associates to the public or to each other, and can cordon off various areas of the website, such as a youth roster viewable only to parents, custom pages for online playbooks viewable only to players, registration for the general public, and so on.

While I have a lot planned, what I really lack to make the site complete is time and capital. This is a side project for me until it (hopefully) grows enough to pay my food and rent. That being said, if I can put more time into the site, or perhaps hire more developers, you will see a jump in features, from storage space to various templates for immediate implementation to the social networking features I talked about above. If you’d like to help, then please spread the word. Money, of course, is always welcome, and it will most likely go immediately towards marketing the site and getting the name out. What is easier for everyone though, is to just tell your friends, fellow coaches, team parents, etc., about the site. Thank you, and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to post something in the Forums or send me an email through the Contact Us Form.