About The Warlocks Web Site

Since 2005, the Warlocks have had a website. We won many awards for our site design over the years, including Best Website at the Pittsburgh regional in 2011 and the Buckeye Regional in 2012. However, as the technology landscape evolved over the years, FIRST decided to discontinue that award. Since then, we have decided to focus our website on promoting the team and communicating with our community and stop building an entirely new site each year.

The site makes use of a CMS system, WordPress, for managing the content of this website. This allows quickly adding and editing content and news to the site from a web browser simply enough that almost anyone can do it. Our site’s WordPress theme has been custom built to match our team’s branding, and utilizes the responsive Bootstrap web framework. It’s even open sourced, and you can check it out on our team’s GitHub page here.

We have upgraded and organized our photo collection, now using Zenphoto. With over 13,000 photos from all our 15+ year history, it’s a part of the site we are proud of for its historical record of the team.

We encourage our Warlocks family to interact by using both our Facebook page and Group, or following us and sending tweets out to @Warlocks1507 or #FRC1507 on Twitter. We also have an Instagram page.

We also make use of Google Calendar for a central schedule of events and have it integrated into this site.

The Website and Media team on the Warlocks consists of a small handful of students each season. The students manage all of the content on our website, as well as writing and posting blog and news articles that highlight the activities and accomplishments of our team. They also take and upload photos of our team throughout each year and place them in our gallery and on our social media channels.

The primary mentor for the Website and Media team is Adam Stockton. He is responsible for maintaining the Content Management System (WordPress), as well as administering our server and hosting infrastructure. He also helps mentor and guide the web students, teaching them how to write content for the web, as well as teaching them about HTML and other useful web technologies. Our website is also hosted by DreamHost, which offers us a non-profit hosting plan free of charge.