Frequently asked questions¶
About the plugin¶
Is it in the WordPress.org plugin directory?¶
No. It is a bespoke plugin built for one club and distributed as a release zip from its repository. That also means there is no automatic update channel — see Updating.
Will it work for my club?¶
It will fit an English grassroots football club without much argument, because it is built around how one works: FA Club Player Report imports, FA Numbers as the identity of a player, per-team FA registrations, date-of-birth squads with a team secretary each, and a season everyone re-confirms.
The further your club is from that shape, the more the vocabulary will grate. Nothing in it is sport-specific beyond the FA integration, but nothing in it is generic either.
Does it work on WordPress multisite?¶
It is a single-site plugin and has not been built or tested against a network. Nothing obviously prevents it, but treat that as untested rather than supported.
What happens to my data if I remove the plugin?¶
Deactivating keeps everything. Deleting the plugin from the Plugins screen runs its uninstall script, which drops every table it created — players, guardians, squads, seasons, registrations, payments and both logs. Back up first. See Deactivating and uninstalling.
Access and accounts¶
Do parents need a WordPress account?¶
No, and they cannot have one for this purpose. Guardians never sign in. Everything they do — confirm a season, set up a payment, request a replacement link — happens through a private link sent to their email address.
How many people can be a club admin?¶
As many as you like. They need an existing WordPress account, added under Settings → Club Admins; every WordPress administrator is one automatically.
Can a team secretary see other squads?¶
No. The scoping is enforced in the data layer, not by hiding menu items — there is no way for a secretary to email or edit anyone outside their own squads, including by editing a URL by hand.
Can one person run two squads?¶
Yes. Put the same email address in the Team secretary field on each squad. To hand a squad over, change that address.
Seasons and registration¶
What does "active season" actually change?¶
The registration form, the payments screens and most reporting default to it. You can pin the
registration form to a specific season with season_id if you need to run two at once — see
Shortcodes.
A parent has three children. Do they get three emails?¶
One. The approval link covers every child that parent has at the club, and the confirmation email lists all of the confirmed children together. This is deliberate: parents with several children are the ones most likely to give up on a form.
Can I confirm a player myself?¶
Yes — club admins and the squad's team secretary can both set a registration status directly, for the parent who telephones rather than clicks.
A parent lost their link and it has expired¶
Point them at the page carrying [cpm_registration_request]. They can get a fresh link by email
address, or go straight through by giving the child's FA Number and date of birth. Both answer
identically whether or not the details match anything, so the form cannot be used to find out who
is registered with the club.
Payments¶
Do I have to use GoCardless?¶
No. Everything else in the plugin works without it, and you can record offline payments against a player by hand. Without a GoCardless account you simply never open the payments settings.
Why is the money split into a registration fee and instalments?¶
Because that is how most clubs charge: something up front to secure the place, then the rest spread out. The plugin uses GoCardless Instant Bank Pay for the up-front fee and a Direct Debit mandate for the instalment plan, and tracks them separately because they fail separately.
One squad pays different fees. Do I need a second product?¶
No — add a squad override on the existing product. See One squad paying something different.
Can I stop one player's instalments without stopping everyone's?¶
Yes. Instalment plans are listed individually and stopped one at a time.
Email¶
Why does bulk email go through a queue?¶
So a large send cannot time out. Messages are queued and drained in batches by a background job, with progress reported as it goes. It also means a site with no working cron will queue mail and never send it — see Troubleshooting.
Does every guardian get their own copy?¶
Yes. There is no shared To or CC line, and a parent with several children gets one email rather than one per child.
How long are emails kept?¶
Sent email is kept in the Email Log for 90 days and pruned automatically. The processing queue keeps finished rows for three days. Both are filterable — see Hooks and filters.
Can club email come from a real person rather than noreply@?¶
That is what Club Mailer is for: each member connects their own Outlook or Gmail mailbox and tagged messages go out as them, landing in their own Sent Items.
Running the site¶
Does it need cron?¶
Yes, in practice. The email queue, the log pruning and the English FA sync are all scheduled jobs.
WP-Cron is enough on a site with steady traffic; a quiet site is better off with a real cron job
calling wp-cron.php.
Is there a WP-CLI interface?¶
Some. Squads can be created and their secretaries set from the command line, and there is a demo data generator for development and staging. See WP-CLI commands.
Can I put demo data on a staging site?¶
Yes — wp cpm generate all builds a realistic dataset, and wp cpm generate reset removes exactly
what it created. It refuses to run in a production environment, so it cannot touch a live club's
site. Details in WP-CLI commands.
Can another plugin add to the Overview screen?¶
Yes. Three actions and a filter let another plugin add panels and headline cards to Club Management → Overview without either plugin knowing about the other. See Hooks and filters.