Special Report :

Administrative Pages

The administrative pages, which are password protected, enable authorized NCOHA personel to post information on the site themselves, without involving the webmaster. The information posted may be news alerts, coaches’s drills, or schedules.

The administrative pages are:

• Site Administration : this simply lists the administrative functions.
• Set/Clear a News Alert : this enables an administrator to set (post) a special news alert, or to clear it.
• Upload Coaches’ Drills : this enables an administrator to upload coaches’ drills.
• Upload Schedules : this enables an administrator to upload schedules.

Important Note : there is a set of administrative pages for each season. The pages are very similar from season to season, but it it is essential to use the right ones. For example, to upload schedules for the 2010/2011 season, it is essential that the 2010/2011 administrative pages be used, not the pages of other seasons. At the beginning of a new season the webmaster will tell authorized NCOHA personel where the season’s Site Administration page is, and what its password is. Links to Site Administration pages appear near the bottom of the Help page’s Site Map.

Site Administration

Before this page will appear, an administrator must enter the username and password given to them by the webmaster at the beginning of the season.

This page simply lists the administrative functions, i.e.:

• Set/Clear a News Alert
• Upload Coaches’ Drills
• Upload Schedules

Set/Clear a News Alert

A news alert is an urgent news item, appearing in the “News & Views” column on the Home page. A news alert appears on the site immediately. An administrator should set a news alert when it is critical that a message appear on the site without delay. A news alert has a date, an optional title, and a message, for example:

There are several restrictions on news alerts:

• There can be only one news alert at a time.
• A news alert is straight text, with no formatting or graphics.
• A news alert should be short, preferably a sentence or two.

The administrative page titled “Set/Clear a News Alert” has two forms, one to set a news alert, and another to clear it. For example:

To set a news alert, enter the date of the news alert, an optional title, and the news alert’s message into the first form, then click the button “Set Alert”. This takes you to a page which summarizes what you have done, and invites you to click a link to the home page to make sure that everything is okay. Note : the news alert may not appear on the home page until you have refreshed the page, perhaps several times; this is because browsers may initially show old versions of pages in order to display pages faster.

To clear a news alert, go down to the second form and click the button “Clear Alert”. This takes you to a page which summarizes what you have done, and invites you to click a link to the home page to make sure that everything is okay. Note : again the news alert may not appear on the home page until you have refreshed the page.

Upload Coaches’ Drills

A Coach’s drill is a PDF document with a specific drill: for example, titled “One-on-one”. The drills are listed on the page ABOUT US : Documents, and may be accessed only by those who have been given a special username and password.

More titles can be added to the list of drills, but only by the the webmaster.

Here is an example of the form:

To upload the PDF document for a drill, go to the page titled “Upload Coaches’ Drills”, click the button “Browse...” to browse your PC’s files and select the document to be uploaded; then click the downward arrow in the “Select Title” field to specify the type of drill; then click “Upload PDF File”. There will be a delay while the file is uploaded, with the delay being longer for longer PDF files or slower Internet connections.

Upload Schedules

There are two kinds of schedules: a Master Schedule, which has all the schedules for all teams; and a Team Calendar, which has the schedule for one team for one month. There is only one Master Schedule, in a very large Excel file; there are 13 monthly team calendars for each team (for April in one year to April in the next year), each in a PDF file. Users will access the Master Schedule from the page SCHEDULES : Our Schedules, and will access team calendars from the team pages.

Tip : uploading team calendars will be easier if the pathname to a team calendar unambiguously identifies the team and the month. For example, if the pathname includes “2010/MajorBantam/July.pdf”, then the upload form can reasonably guess that the calendar is the July 2010 schedule for the Major Bantam team; but if the pathname is (for example) “Bantam07.pdf”, then the upload form can infer nothing for certain.

The administrative page titled “Upload Schedules” has two forms, one to upload the Master Schedule, and another to upload the monthly team schedules. For example:

To upload the Master Schedule, go to the first form. Click the button “Browse...” to browse your PC’s files and select the Excel document to be uploaded, then click “Upload Excel File”. There will be a delay while the file is uploaded, with the delay being longer for longer PDF files or slower Internet connections.

To upload a Team Calendar, go to the second form. Click the button “Browse...” to browse your PC’s files and select the PDF document to be uploaded. At this point, if the document’s pathname unambiguously identifies the team and the month, the Team and Month fields of the form will be automatically filled in, and you can simply click “Upload PDF File” to upload the file. But if the document’s pathname doesn’t unambiguously identify the team and the month, you must select the team and/or month yourself before clicking “Upload PDF File”. (You can see that picking filenames which imply the team and month will not only save you time when using this form, but also prevent you from uploading the wrong file.)