Companion plugins¶
Club Player Manager does one job: the club's people, their registrations and their money. Three separate plugins add things a club often wants alongside that, without being folded into it.
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English FA
Pulls fixtures and results from FA Full-Time for the teams the club already registers players to, and publishes them through shortcodes and a generated page per team.
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Club Mailer
Lets each WordPress user connect their own Outlook or Gmail mailbox, so club email can go out from a real person's address and land in their own Sent Items.
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Referees
Keeps the club's referee list — names and phone numbers — and publishes it to the people the club names, behind the sign-in its parents already use.
How they relate to the core plugin¶
They are genuinely separate plugins, not modules. That has consequences worth knowing before you install one:
They install, update, back up and uninstall independently. Each keeps its data in its own tables. Deleting English FA removes its teams and matches and leaves every player record untouched.
They read from the core plugin; they never write to it. English FA reads the distinct team names out of the FA registrations the core plugin already holds — that is how its Teams screen can offer you the teams the club actually registers players to, with a player count against each. It stores everything else itself.
They need the core plugin present. All three declare Requires Plugins: club-management, so
WordPress will not activate one first. English FA will also run with the core plugin absent in the
sense that it does not fatal — you simply type the team names in yourself instead of picking them
from a list. Referees leans on it harder than the others: the sign-in its referee list sits behind
is the core plugin's, which is the point of it — one sign-in for the club, not two.
They are versioned against a platform contract, not against the core plugin's version. The shared admin scaffolding the core plugin exposes — page handlers, view helpers, capability checks — has a version of its own. A companion plugin declares the minimum it needs and refuses to load, with an admin notice rather than a fatal error, against a core that is too old. This matters because core and companions deploy separately: for a few minutes after a release the site can be running a new companion against the previous core, and that window is designed to be harmless.
Developers extending the plugin will want the platform layer for the detail.
Which to install¶
None is required, and none depends on another.
| Plugin | Install it if |
|---|---|
| English FA | Your teams are on FA Full-Time and you want fixtures and results on the club site without maintaining them twice |
| Club Mailer | Club email should come from a named person rather than a shared noreply@ address — and you can register an app in Microsoft Entra or Google Cloud once |
| Referees | The club books its own referees, and the people who do that booking need their numbers to hand without them being on the public web |
Club Mailer is the most involved to set up, because OAuth requires an app registration with the mail provider. English FA needs no keys at all — just a Full-Time URL per team — and Referees needs none either: a name, a number, and the email addresses of the people who may read them.
Installation for both is the ordinary upload-a-zip flow; see Installation.