Notes for Local Webmasters Using Blue Sombrero

The Blue Sombrero website is designed for "clubs" (or in the AYSO case, regions) where the board members are not very tech savvy.  With a small amount of effort it is possible to get a website that meets many people's view of a good marketing site (reasonable template view, lots of images and icons, integration of news and social media material).

However, for some of those used to living around Silicon Valley and dealing with the assumed high-degree of tech, the system can be a bit limiting and maybe frustrating.  The following are notes from my attempt to migrate over from a Google Sites based environment in late 2016.

Think carefully about assigning roles to the region board members.  The default roles in the Blue Sombrero system are locked down pretty tight -- which might make sense in many small business environments, but may clash with those groups that push authorities/responsibilities down as close to the individual worker as possible.  Other than the admin accounts, the predefined roles hew towards the least possible rights granted to accomplish the tasks -- many of these officers will need occasional assistance from one of the admin accounts to accomplish some of the occasional tasks (for example, the "web admin" role can update the website pages but cannot upload anything into the documents folder).  As is noted in the Security Roles help page, rather than overload an individual with many roles, you may want to promote those few folks with "Club Admin" authority (if you can trust them with very broad authorities) because the system is not good at managing individuals with several overlapping access rules).

The File Manager in Blue Sombrero is relatively limited, at least compared to services such as Google Sites where attaching documents to and existing webpage is straightforward.  By default, only the "Club Admin" role appears to have broad authority to upload documents.  There is a helpful note on the Security Roles help page which details a way to provide write access to individual roles for specific folders within the File Manager.  Note: there is currently a rather tight size limit of 8MB for any single item in the File Manager (and, for comparison, the current Laws of the Game in PDF form weighs in at 12MB...)  For those cases where sharing of documents is a key requirement, it might make sense to make use of a Google Sites page or just convert over to Google Docs.

There is viable support for embedding Google-based materials in Blue Sombrero.  They have implemented a rudimentary method for embedding Google Calendars [help] and Google Docs [help] (though unlike the corresponding gadget in Google Sites, an embedded Google Doc may still show all of the control menus, et al, not just the document contents).   With different 'share' links, the same basic feature also can be used to embed maps created in the Google MyMaps tool.

Note: Original AYSO 2J website content is still available at https://sites.google.com/site/aysoarea2j/