Great Britain Bulldogs Official Website

So... blogging has finally made an appearance on the Bulldogs website. Very minor splash it's making at the moment, but the aim is for players and staff to get involved, hopefully both past and present, to bring a more personal and colourful account of what makes the Bulldogs tick.

So, as the webmaster I guess I get to lead the way, well, at least for the first few postings.

I've been asked what's going on with the website repeatedly since... well, almost forever, so my main objective here is to keep adding little notes to let you know what's been done, what's being planned and some thoughts surrounding it all.

First up is the new hosting arrangements. These came into effect at the end of November and have provided us with a much wider technical base to build upon which is why we are in the process of expanding our content and efforts with this site. However, the process of migrating the site (whilst relatively painless) gave us the opportunity to look at how things have progressed over the last year with the intial Mambo based site, and how we can go forward. The change was motivated by a combination of hosting costs and limited service provision, both things that have dramatically improved in the move.

Joomla (for those who don't know) is a web-based Content Management System that shares a common root with Mambo. They're both php based and (joomla certainly) has a fairly large international presence with an active developer community (of which we're part). Joomla provides the foundations for this websystem (the eFootball system - more on that in a later post) providing the means to easily create, edit and remove web pages and content without needing to having expert coding knowledge - in fact, most of this work is done via a Word-like interface in the management console. Using this simple approach means more people can be involved in adding news, photos, etc and the complexity and depth of the system means we can add more functionality to it fairly easily as time goes on.

With the change of CMS, the appearance got a makeover at the same time. Custom template designs can be a pain in the ass to do, and this particular format was no exception, but after a couple of weeks cursing IE for it's non-compliance, a solution was found and the result is the layout and appearance you see now. It's likely to change slightly over time, and the beauty of this approach is that we can change the theme without affecting the content, which makes purely superficial updates not interfere with the site's operation.

There is a poll running on the front page that has been going over a week now looking for some user feedback as to what aspects to focus our limited development time on next. I expected that a photo gallery would be the most likely feature in demand and so have been working on integrating a suitable system into the site. Thanks to the new servers we were able to select from a larger range of available products and have now settled on a media system which I'm in the process of activating.

The Media Centre is currently running in development, and has over 3600 Bulldogs images uploaded already! These images have come from my own collection over the last couple of years and are being used as test content whilst I work on tying the systems together and working out how we can manage this going forward. We want you to be able to easily upload Bulldogs related media, but that has security implications for the site in general and I can't just throw the boat in the water and then try to patch the holes as she sinks - the new system needs to be watertight (or as good as) before it's made generally available. I hope this process will be completed in the next week or two (Christmas festivities withstanding).

After that, well, the Poll is still running so I'll see how it goes. Ideas we're looking at include:

• expanding this blogging system to past and present Bulldogs
• adding much more content about the current and past squads ranging from game reports, rosters, player biographies, coaching news and more
• integrating a forum so all members can easily keep in contact with Bulldogs at large - and ideally integrating with the BSAFA forum so we don't start completely separate communities
• and anything else you can suggest...?

Suggestions should be emailed to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or posted on the BSAFA forum in the Great Britain Bulldogs section.