Setting up a football team website?

Dave!

Hey folks,

Just wondering if ye could help me out

A mate asked me if I could set up a website for his football team

It'd have the history of the club, contact info, pictures, etc.

But it'd also need to have a league table, and results, that can be updated by the manager.

Just wondering what would be the best way to go about this? My hosting has Joomla and Wordpress available to install, so I figure one of those would make sense. I'm more familiar with Wordpress, so would prefer to use that.

Any suggestions on any aspects of it?

I'm only teaching myself web design, so this will be a learning process as much as anything I'm good at HTML and CSS though

Eoin

Check out this thread - it's quite similar to your query.

Our rugby club just moved to www.pitchero.com which is a free service that provides the functionality you're looking for (not sure about league tables, as I think they like to administer that centrally) - but it won't give you much scope to learn any web dev skills.

It's not that hard to set up any site to add fixtures and all that, but in my experience it's really the linking of data that can take a while.

For instance, a fixture will obviously have the team. You might want the team to show the players, and you might want the players to have profiles. When you add a result, you might want to link it to a match report and photos/videos etc. You might also want to link the scores to the players.

When you add a result to a fixture, then it becomes a result. So do you want to display these separately?

Lots of things to think about. There might be some plugins for the open source systems that might help.

pts

Hi Dave,
Something like this might be close to what you need?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/leaguemanager/

pauldiv

That league manager plug-in for wordpress looks really cool and they have rated it 4/5

Wordpress is not too hard for an enthusiastic beginner to learn and it has excellent documentation and a thriving user community

The people in the Wordpress forum are very helpful

Good luck

Dave!

Cheers lads

What I was hoping for was something like this:

--------------BANNER--------------------

NAV-------MAIN CONTENT-------LEAGUE TABLE

------------FOOTER----------------------

The navigation would be static on the left

The main content would be the blog entries that are usually put on the front page in WP

And I'd like for the league table to be another blog entry/page that stays on the right hand side of the main page, but it's easily editable via the backend

But I can't figure out a way to do that It's pretty much just the league table that's messing me up

pts

I'm not sure if I understand exactly how you want it to work. According to the plugin FAQ you can insert the league table where you want it by using:

<?php leaguemanager_display_widget( league_ID ); ?>

Is that kind of what you were asking or did I get it horribly wrong? :-)

Dave!

Cheers for the ideas lads

This is the site at the moment
www.ourladyofvictoryfc.com/home

Would ye be able to give me some feedback on it?

I think it looks pretty good ! I pretty much just edited the default WP theme by getting rid of the side bar and having a horizontal nav bar instead. I also got rid of the comments.

Those WP plugins aren't really what I'm looking for for displaying the table I don't think... Alot of features on it are fairly unnecessary. Consequently I just have a basic text thing using hyphens to set the layout. I've tried using a html table and formatting it with css, but the manager of the football team won't know any of that so he won't be able to edit it himself.

I think the typography is horrible on the site also -- any suggestions in that area?

Also you couldn't really tell it's a football website, could you? Any suggestions for 'footballing it up' ? Maybe use absolute positioning to stick a few photos of the team around the page?

The WP 'quick post' feature should be grand for the manager to post updates after each match, etc., and he can edit the table and results the normal way.

Thanks

Eoin

Can't really go wrong with Arial as a font for the web, so change this file:
http://ourladyofvictoryfc.com/home/wp-content/themes/classic/style.css

Dave!

Done

Any other thoughts on it eoin? Cheers

Eoin

Think you have some Times New Roman sneaking in there for the blog titles - change these to arial also as it's a really ugly font on the web.

You can use the <pre> HTML tag so it will render spaces and tabs, as HTML doesn't do this by default. This might help for the league tables and so on.

Dave!

Lads I've a question that someone might be able to help me with

At the moment the manager is happy enough to copy and paste the league table from the league's website, but for future references I'd love to be able to automatically update it without them having to go near it.

The league website is here
http://www.amateurfootballleague.com/viewResults-0910a.aspx

They're in Division 2 Sunday, so you need to select it from the dropdown menu

I'm wondering is there some script or something that I could use that would automatically go to that page, select the option from the dropdown menu, and then select the code for the table -- and then of course display it on my webpage

Any suggestions?

I'm learning jQuery at the moment and it has a function called load() that allows you to load in a file (eg. html page... hopefully .aspx page too...)

You can also select code from the page, and append it to a part of the other page.

I'll give it a shot to see if I can use something like that, but the problem is I would have to use the dropdown menu first to get it to display the right table. However when I do select the right league, the address in the address bar doesn't change, so I'm not sure where the site is loading the information from.

Can someone determine from the source code how it's done?

Eoin

You might be able to send a POST request to that page (rather than a standard GET), and that will allow you to pass in the league ID. You should get permission from the site owner though. You could also ask them if they could provide an RSS feed.