This new launch is the culmination of months of work between Sorca and USA Rugby South. USARS has thousands of members, all across the Southwest United States. They govern every Rugby club from Tennssee, to North Carolina to Florida to Alabama.
So needless to say they needed a site that communicated with all those clubs, players, coaches and referees very effectively. We decided on WordPress as a platform and using a plethora of plugins, made it a hub that everyone can make use of.
There are 80 pages, 13 plugins and 10 administrators! See how it looked before :
The navigation was sporadic and inconsistent, the content was difficult to access and the code was a nightmare! So we organized the menus into Competition and Administration. The Competition menu (left) deals with the various ‘divisions’ that USARS serves. Men, women, High School etc, and their scores, commissioners and fixtures. Using a JavaScript accordion menu makes moving around the long menu quick and easy. The administration menu runs horizontally across the top, and houses organizational information like contact info, bye-laws, meetings, as well as a large History section. This menu was powered by my all-time favorite JavaScript menu, Suckerfish on Roids
Plugins
So how do you turn WordPress into a CMS that does it all? By using the following plugins
- AdSense Manager : for the affiliate banners
- All in One SEO Pack : for the results!
- Breadcrumb NavXT : to make deep navigation easier
- Calendar : powering the color-coded event page
- Contact Form 7 : easy contact form, also used to submit scores
- Intense Debate : to control manage comments/commenters
(I just disabled this, as it was constantly calling an analytics program and slowing my site down) - Post Notifications : Emails new posts to all subscribers. This has replaced Yahoo groups for USARS
- Role Scooper : amazingly complex plugin that limits an admins access to pages and posts
- Wickett Twitter Widget: Very simple and to-the-point- Display tweets from a Twitter account in the sidebar of your blog
- Tiny MCE Advanced : excellent toolbar which gives more formatting options when posting
- WordPress Database Backup : emails a backup of your database at a scheduled interval
- WP Menu Manager : manages all the menus, allowing navigation editing without using html or templates
- WP Super Cache : to speed it up!