Rosterity Help Page

Introduction: Rosterity is intended to be a lightweight, configurable means of keeping track of teams of people who meet on a regular basis. It was written with sports teams in mind, but there's nothing saying that it can't be used by other groups.

Before developing Rosterity, the author (who was the captain of a couple of different sports teams) was manually sending e-mails to his team, polling them on who would be playing or not playing for that week's game. E-mail, being what it is, would get lost, mis-filed or deleted.

With Rosterity, teams can have one centralized place where they can look at upcoming games, see who's going to be there, schedule their absences, and so on.

If this page does not address a question, feel free to send the author a message at 'admin@rosterity.com'. He'll do his best to get back to you ASAP.

Rosterity is still under development - the developer will do his best to keep all data intact. If you have any suggestions on how to improve Rosterity, let me know.

Creating a Team

The first thing a team organizer will want to do in Rosterity is create their team. The following info is requested:

Field Description

Team Nickname This is a shorter form of the team name - this is used in the URL for your team's start page, and is used to cross-reference all of your team's player and game data. Choose it wisely, because once you register it can't be changed. Nicknames must be unique in the Rosterity database.
Full team name A possibly longer form of the team's name which will appear on webpages.
E-mail contact A (hopefully valid) e-mail address. This will not be shown on the webpages, and the page itself does not generate any messages automatically - it's mainly a way for the Rosterity developer to let users know about any changes that might impact their website usage.
Password for users Rosterity's security model is pretty simple - all players on a team use the same password. Having this password will allow a user to edit their attendance information, or to change the attendance info on another player's behalf. It does not allow users to edit game or player information. When creating a team, you're asked to enter your new user password twice to ensure that you're typing what you think you're typing.
Admin password The key to the kingdom. This allows the team admin to edit their roster & schedule, and to change the player categories (more about this later). Again, you're asked to verify your admin password.
Player categories (optional) Depending on your team or league, you could have different categories for players. In a co-ed league, you could have different categories for males & females. It could be broken down by position (Goalies, Forwards, Defense), or left blank to have all of your players lumped together in one category. It's up to you. On the front page, the game summary will show you how many players of each category have indicated that they'll be at a given game - make it whatever you feel will be the most useful.
Team Add Code A magic word that allows a team to be added - this is included so I don't wake up one morning and find that 1000 new teams were added overnight by some surfer who stumbled across the website. To get the code, use this form and supply your desired team nickname and a valid e-mail address - the team code will be mailed to you.

Field	Description
Team Nickname	This is a shorter form of the team name - this is used in the URL for your team's start page, and is used to cross-reference all of your team's player and game data. Choose it wisely, because once you register it can't be changed. Nicknames must be unique in the Rosterity database.
Full team name	A possibly longer form of the team's name which will appear on webpages.
E-mail contact	A (hopefully valid) e-mail address. This will not be shown on the webpages, and the page itself does not generate any messages automatically - it's mainly a way for the Rosterity developer to let users know about any changes that might impact their website usage.
Password for users	Rosterity's security model is pretty simple - all players on a team use the same password. Having this password will allow a user to edit their attendance information, or to change the attendance info on another player's behalf. It does not allow users to edit game or player information. When creating a team, you're asked to enter your new user password twice to ensure that you're typing what you think you're typing.
Admin password	The key to the kingdom. This allows the team admin to edit their roster & schedule, and to change the player categories (more about this later). Again, you're asked to verify your admin password.
Player categories (optional)	Depending on your team or league, you could have different categories for players. In a co-ed league, you could have different categories for males & females. It could be broken down by position (Goalies, Forwards, Defense), or left blank to have all of your players lumped together in one category. It's up to you. On the front page, the game summary will show you how many players of each category have indicated that they'll be at a given game - make it whatever you feel will be the most useful.
Team Add Code	A magic word that allows a team to be added - this is included so I don't wake up one morning and find that 1000 new teams were added overnight by some surfer who stumbled across the website. To get the code, use this form and supply your desired team nickname and a valid e-mail address - the team code will be mailed to you.

Team Page

Once your team has been created, it will appear in the selection form on the Rosterity start page. To bypass this form and go directly to your team's page, use a URL of the following form:

http://www.rosterity.com/start.php?tid=nickname

Your team page will show you a list of upcoming games (past games are not shown), and it will have a field at the bottom where you can enter your team's user password. Entering the password will open up the forms that allow users to submit attendance information.

The Admin Page

Okay, you've created your team, now what? To get to your team's admin page, log in as a regular user first. A new link will appear at the bottom of the page that will take you to your team's administration page (where you log in using your team's admin password). Once you've logged in, you'll see some forms that allow you to add, modify and remove players and games, and to modify your team's information and player categories. You can also change your user and admin passwords.

Special note: if you change the list of player categories, make sure you revisit the list of players to see if the assigned categories make sense. After changing the categories, the forms on the admin page and the tables on the start page will be updated to reflect the changes.

Editing Attendance Info

Now that you have games and players, you can edit your attendance info. Go back to your start page, pick a game and click on the 'Edit Game' button. This will display a form that lists the players' current attendance data with corresponding 'notes' - after making the changes that you want to make, click on the 'Update' button to commit the changes to Rosterity's database.

Administrivia/Support

Rosterity doesn't have an army of support staff - it's just me. If there's an issue with the page (forgotten passwords, access problems), let me know (admin@rosterity.com) and I'll get to it.

Once you have created a team, please do not share the 'Team Add' code - for now, I'd prefer that all requests for new teams go through me - maybe in the future I'll open it up.

Rosterity is free to use. of course, if you'd like to make any donations to support its development/operation, let me know and we can work something out. :-)

Written by Chris Butler, admin@rosterity.com Back to the Rosterity start page