MSTW News Archive

Website fully recovered … finally!

First, HAPPY HOLIDAYS to you all. I hope your fall seasons were a success and your winter seasons have started on a positive note.

Shoal Summit Solutions

I’m happy to report that the shoalsummitsolutions.com website has been recovered from the DOS attack. In the process, I changed hosting providers and redesigned the website to have more of a one page feel. The large array of menus at the top of the page is gone but all the features (almost, read on) are there. Before going into what’s next, I want to thank those of you who’ve experienced problems with communication with me, buying/renewing premium plugins, getting to the support forums, and so forth. Thanks for hanging in there.

The biggest challenge with the site migration was a move the PHP version 8 (8.2.26 to be exact). As some of you may have experienced, PHP8 tends to break a number of older plugins. This is not PHP’s fault, or WordPress’s fault, the blame lies on plugin developers (like me) not paying attention to a long string of warnings. It broke several of the plugins I use on shoalsummitsolutions.com (not MSTW plugins, read on).

Anyway, in this process the dev.shoalsummitsolutions.com site, which contained all the plugin demos, is being migrated into the main shoalsummitsolutions.com domain. I am currently retesting all the plugins on PHP 8, and updating the user’s manuals as necessary. I hope to have this done by the first of the year because I know the latest versions of a number of the MSTW plugins work on PHP8. (But you never know during the Holiday season.) SO, if you have upgrade requests for any of the plugins, please send them to me ASAP. Don’t rely on my lists, just jump back into the queue.

Updating Website

I am in the process of changing hosting providers. In the process both shoalsummitsolutions.com and dev.shoalsummitsolutions.com MAY experience intermittent outages. If you need support with manuals, products, forums, etc and the websites are down, please contact me directly [email protected].

MSTW Team Rosters 4.6 Release

Version 4.6 of the MSTW Team Rosters plugin will be released later this week. It should appear on your plugins page, or you can pull it from WordPress.org. It contains the following features:

Custom ordering of fields/columns. The plugin now allows admins to customize the order of roster fields/plugins on the plugin’s Settings screen, similar to MSTW League Manager plugin. This applies only to custom roster types, other defined roster types like, pro, high-school, college, etc.

Players on multiple teams. Fixed the dropdown menu on the Player Profiles screen for players on multiple teams. The team’s players now display correctly. Note this is only an issue when a player is on multiple team. (For example, on the MSTW dev site, Willie Mays on the 1954 NY Giants and the 1962 SF Giants.)

Player Galleries. Improved the responsiveness of player galleries to the default data fields/columns (set on the Settings screen -> Roster Table Fields & Columns tab) and color (set on the Roster Table Colors tab) combined with any arguments provided to the shortcode.

Player Galleries Taxonomy Pages. Did you know Player Galleries can be displayed in two ways – the [mstw-tr-gallery] shortcode and team taxonomy pages ?? The team taxonomy pages now accept the arguments that the shortcode accepts. See the link from team taxonomy pages above and/or the MSTW Team Rosters man pages for a more complete discussion.

New POEdit Template. Created a new POEdit Template file for I18N (translation) support.

VERSION 4.7
Development of version 4.7 will begin soon. It will include the initial implementation of multiple years for teams, and improvements to CSV Import/Export to move rosters between sites. If you have other items on your wish-list, please send me e-mail ASAP.

Team Rosters 4.5

Team Rosters version 4.5 is now available on wordpress.org. This release includes a number of new features and several bug fixes. The significant enhancements include:

A complete summary of changes is available on this man page and in the plugin’s readme.txt file. The following video provides a summary of the color and data field settings for the [mstw-roster-table-2] shortcode.

What’s next? Several upgrades and clean-up chores are on the list:

  • Upgrading the Data Fields and Columns settings to allow columns to be re-positioned.
  • Investigate adding a year for each roster, and allowing the capability to move a team’s players from one year’s roster to the next year, perhaps updating the applicable information like class and experience and ‘graduating’ seniors.
  • Add the recently added fields like ‘long position’ and ‘long class’ to the CSV import feature and re-test.
  • Clean up the player photo size mess. I’m not settled on what to do here, but the player photos may be locked in at 125×125 px. (Scaling appropriately when resizing windows. I recommend using this size until this gets sorted out.

If you have other requests now is the time to send them.

MSTW Bracket Builder Version 1.3

Version 1.3 of the MSTW Bracket Builder Free and Premium plugins is now available. Users of the free version should have been notified in their Admin Dashboard about the upgrade on WordPress.org. Users of the premium version may now download it from the MSTW Store (www.shoalsummitsolutions.com -> Store -> All My Downloads). If version 1.2 is working great for you, there’s no pressing reason to download this version. You can read more about why it is (or will soon be) necessary in this post.

New Versions of MSTW Bracket Builder

The following gets a bit ‘computer-nerdy’, so cutting to the chase, if your version the plugin is working for you, there’s no need to upgrade MSTW Bracket Builder or MSTW Bracket Builder Premium right now. The functional upgrades in these releases are minimal, and you probably don’t need them.

New versions of MSTW Bracket Builder (1.3) and MSTW Bracket Builder Premium (v1.3) will be released this week. These versions were created because PHP (a programming language that WordPress depends on) depreciated the each( ) function, which unfortunately these plugins use in critical ways. How critical? You could not create tournaments without it.

This may be too much information, so feel free to stop reading, but this will affect all WordPress sites in the not too distant future. So …

WordPress currently recommends PHP 7.4. However, security support for PHP 7.4 is ending this month (Nov 2022). So hosting providers will likely be moving to PHP 8.0 in the not too distant future. The good news is that WordPress itself is already compatible with PHP 8.0.

PHP 8.0 is a major version update with a large number of changes that break backwards compatibility, and many features that were deprecated within the PHP 7.x feature releases have been officially removed. So some plugins, my guess is more than a few, will break when websites [hosting providers] upgrade to PHP 8.0. Actually PHP 8.1 is already released. That’s how this all got started with MSTW Bracket Builder. I’m wading through the rest of the MSTW plugins right now.

If you are running plugins that are critical to your site, you might want to research those plugins’ status with regard to PHP 8.0.

BTW, thanks very much to the PHP 8.0 “early adopters” who brought this issue to my attention. You know who you are! While, I may have been cursing you when the plugin code was laying in pieces and everything was broken (JK), I appreciate you because I have been ignoring this issue for far too long.

MSTW Team Rosters 4.4

MSTW Team Rosters 4.4 will be released soon. It contains three new features:

  • The new [mstw-tr-roster-2] shortcode (display shown below).
  • Added a new “long format” player position (shown in the shortcode display below)
  • Worked on improved responsiveness of this page, and re-worked the player profile/bio page display to greatly improve its responsiveness.

The man page for the shortcode is available here.

A quick introduction to the [mstw-tr-roster-2] shortcode:

Team Rosters 4.3

An update to Team Rosters 4.3 should have appeared in your admin panel. It has two new features:

  • The Settings link from the plugins page now works (most people don’t use this, but it’s there and can be convenient)
  • A dropdown menu of all players on a selected team appears on the player bio page for all players on that team

If you don’t particularly need these features, there’s no real need to update.

New Features in the Next Release

New features are planned for future releases. The list of features has not been finalized for any version. Some requests are:

  • A dropdown menu to switch between teams in the roster table and gallery views, much like the new dropdown on the single player bio page
  • Increases control/flexibility of the data fields displayed in the roster table, gallery, and single player bio views
  • Upgraded views of roster tables
  • Improved control of the size of player photos ( a feature that definitely has some issues right now)
  • Addition of a year (season) to each roster, so one can build an organized history of a team’s rosters

If you have something you would like to see in a future release of Team Rosters, now is the time to send them to me via e-mail.

Support for MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards

Support for the MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards plugin is being phased out. The plugin will continue to be maintained on the wordpress.org plugin site in support of legacy users, all new users should go with the MSTW League Manager plugin, which is very actively maintained. Legacy users of Schedules & Scoreboards should also consider migration to League Manager for improved features and support.

It is still available on the WordPress.org site, and the documentation will be available on this site. So it can still be used, and it will work with future versions of WordPress for some time. If there are bugs, I will look into them. However, the plugin will not be enhanced in any way.

While the name might sound like overkill for small, simple sites, it really isn’t. While League Manager provides more features and advanced features for larger, regional sites, it can also be used just like Schedules & Scoreboards for simpler sites without the need for advanced features. So there is really no need to use MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards or continue to support it (at the expense of the other MSTW plugins).

MSTW League Manager & Add-ons 2.10

Version 2.10 of MSTW League Manager and League Manager Add-ons has been released.

What’s New

The primary new functionality is improved handling of Overtime Games when Standings are being auto-calculated using MTW League Manager Add-ons. In fact, until this version, there was no way to indicate that a game ended in overtime so the auto-fill of standings could process it correctly.

Several new videos are available on League Manager, including how to handle overtime games with and without the MSTW League Manager plugin. Visit shoalsummitsolutions.com to view them.

Other than that, you can read about the minor changes in the Change Logs in the readme files or on the website – MSTW League Manager Change Log or MSTW League Manager Add-ons Change Log.