Partner Site of the Month: DC Gay Flag Football League, by Ed Cupaioli

Creating a new static site for a football league with dozens of teams across different competitive divisions, multiple field venues, game times — with drafts and new rosters every single season — might sound like a huge task. For developer Ed Cupaioli, it was a chance to craft the most intricately relational site he had ever made, from the ground up — and to put CloudCannon’s Git-based CMS through its paces.

The resulting site, dcgffl.org, is a fantastic resource for DC’s premier LGBTQ+ flag football league, as well as its community of athletes, allies, family, friends, and fans. Built with Jekyll and fully integrated with CloudCannon, the new site makes everything as easy as possible for league officials to update scores, rosters, and more — even allowing them to update the site from the field.

CloudCannon loves relational data 🤝

As a new CloudCannon Partner migrating from Forestry, Ed was happy to find that CloudCannon identified and supported the linked and structured data types he needed to create: each player relating to a team, each team relating to a match schedule, which itself relates to the playing venues. It was a big undertaking, but the site has been a huge success.

This is probably the most robust, complex CMS integration I've ever built — there is nothing more complex than this. I thought, “I'm just going to put all my passion and love for this league into it, as well as my love for user experience.”

Now that Ed has set up the site, adding new players, teams, and locations via CloudCannon’s Data Editor is a straightforward task for anyone — there’s no technical knowledge required:

Microblogging in the Content Editor

Because DCGFFL spans both social sport and competitive travel play, it’s important to the league that the site also reflects the fun that players are having on the field. To do this, Ed built in a small blogging feature called Power Rankings. With CloudCannon’s WYSIWYG Content Editor, writers can report on teams’ progress for each week of the season — and encourage or trash talk each other with precisely targeted GIFs.

They'll do the power rankings based on everybody's records, but of course they have GIFs and fun stuff like that. So I wanted to give them a space that they could actually easily update this. So they can order by the teams, they'll add a team, they'll add in their record.

Because we're using this relational content, they can see the team, their record, and their schedule. And I'm actually using Liquid here to calculate a win, a loss, or a tie.

Updating the site is so simple

For such a complex site, it’s a testament to Ed’s integration of CloudCannon’s editing capabilities that it can all be managed by one editor, from the seasonal drafts, team management, and scheduling games, all the way through to updating game scores. (That editor has found the entire process “remarkably easy” — whether they’re updating the site via mobile phone or laptop.)

And for a league as actively welcoming to players of all backgrounds as the DCGFFL is, it’s only fitting that their site is so welcoming to all users — whether they’re trying to join a team, find out when and where a game will be played, or catch up on the weekend’s scores.

About Ed Cupaioli

Ed Cupaioli makes websites that are fast, secure, WCAG compliant, data-driven, and fully editable. He’s focused on user experience, and designs, codes, and optimizes all of his sites — as well as helping his users manage their own content.

About DC Gay Flag Football League

The DCGFFL started informally in 1994 and is now DC’s premier LGBTQ+ flag football league. Since its early beginnings, the league has grown to over 200 players. As a vibrant community of athletes, allies, family, and friends, the league welcomes new players, regardless of their experience.