I am happy to introduce our newsletter. Subscribers will receive news of the latest plugin releases and developments on the My Sports Team Website (MSTW) framework, as well as links to the latest user documentation.

If you receive this via e-mail, it’s because you have corresponded with me about my plugins outside the WordPress forums. If you’d like to unsubscribe, you may do so at any time using the unsubscribe link in the e-mail. But I hope you will subscribe (if you’re reading this on the site) or stay subscribed (if you’re reading this in e-mail). News of the latest Team Rosters release will appear today or tomorrow. And news of the MSTW Framework will be appearing throughout the summer as I hope to have it ready for (American) football season.

A BETA version of the Game Schedules plugin version 3.0 is now available for testing. Be the first kid on your block to have this cool new toy!! If you would like to test drive this BETA prior to its release on WordPress.org, contact me at [email protected].

The Game Schedules plugin is undergoing a major overhaul in response to user requests. New and upgraded features include:

• Game Time is now entered based on a 24 hour clock which will eliminate the sensitivity to the format of the text entry. In short, you now enter 13:30 via two pull-downs instead of  “01:30 pm”. This format is also more ‘friendly’ to our many international users. Entries for “TBA” are also entered via a new pull-down rather than over-riding the time text field in previous versions.
• The timezone defaults to the timezone setting in the WordPress Dashboard Settings->General screen.
• The date and time formats for the Game Schedule table and countdown timer [shortcodes] and the widgets and the admin screens are set in a new Games->Display Settings admin screen.
• NEW! A maximum number of games that are displayed can now be set in the schedule table [shortcode] and widget. Only specified number of games will be displayed from the current time forward.
• NEW! A start and end date for the games that are displayed can now be set in the schedule table [shortcode] and widget. If the maximum number of games is set, only that number of games between the start and end dates will be displayed.
• NEW! Schedules may now be uploaded from Comma Separated Value (CSV) format files.

Game Schedules version 3.0 is planned for release before Spring 2013. Planned features that may or may not make the Spring release:

• A ‘single game display’ that will show the teams with logos and other game information in a larger format. It will be a custom page template for a game post type, much like the ‘single player’ display in the Team Rosters plugin.
• A schedule ‘gallery’ page that will show the entire schedule in the ‘single game’ format described above. It will be a custom taxonomy page for a new taxonomy for games, much like the ‘player gallery’ page in the Team Rosters plugin.

Team Rosters version 2.0, which was released last week, offers a number of cool enhancements.

• Upload Rosters from CSV FIles New in version 2.0 is the ability to upload rosters from CSV format files. Most teams seem to create rosters for print media using MS Excel. From there you can save the file in CSV format and upload the roster into your website. Very cool if I do say so myself.
• Hide the Weights You can now remove the weight column in some or all of your rosters. It seems women’s teams are not big fans of the weight column, in fact I haven’t found one that uses it. So now you can remove the offending column from your rosters.
• Baseball Team Formats Version 2.0 now supports baseball rosters with the addition of Bats and Throws fields that are present in every baseball site I’ve looked at.

Version 2.4 of the Game Schedules plugin is now available on WordPress. It contains a fix for the famous “TBD bug”. (See the “No Time” post on the plugin’s WordPress forum.) Please let me know if you encounter further problems with this one. In version 3.0 (no schedule yet) I will re-write the Add/Edit Game admin screen, improve the error checking there, and put this one in its final resting place.

It also contains Spanish translation files in the /lang directory. (Thanks to Roberto from Madrid.)

Version 1.1 of the Team Rosters plugin is now available on the WordPress plugin site. You can find it here or just install it from your site’s admin plugins page.

The following enhancements have been added to version 1.1:

• Introduced the “Player Gallery” view of a roster
• Admin settings now allow the roster sort order to be numerical or alphabetical (by last name) in both the table [shortcode] and the player gallery.
• Added admin settings enable or disable links from both the table view [shortcode] and the player gallery to the single player pages.
• An admin setting controls the title of the “Player Bio” content box on the single player view. By default, it is “Player Bio”.
• Added fields to the player post type so that no field serves different purposes in different views [high-school|college|pro]. Note that not every field is used in every views and many fields are used in multiple views. However, every field now has one and only one meaning.

The first version of the Team Rosters plugin is now available on WordPress. The Team Rosters plugin creates a custom post type (player), installs an editor for this post type, and provides a shortcode to display rosters as simple html tables. Players are assigned to team rosters using a custom taxonomy for teams. The plugin supports as many players and team rosters as you need.

A shortcode adds team rosters to your site in three tabular formats – high school, college, and pro. A custom ‘single-player’ view displays individual players in a ‘player bio’ format. To use this feature, a custom template (single-player.php) needs to be copied into your theme’s directory.

The look of roster tables and player bios can be customized using the plugin’s settings or by editing the plugin’s stylesheet. The admin screen’s settings over-ride the stylesheet.

The plugin is currently being enhanced to support a ‘gallery view’ of a team and to upload teams from CSV formatted files. The goal is to have these enhancements in place before the end of 2012.

Version 2.1 of the popular Game Schedules plugin was released last weekend. This version includes the following upgrades and bug fixes:

• Added the user-requested option for a link from a game’s location field (displayed in the [shortcode] table and the countdown widget) to a specified URL.
• Corrected a typo that make the new links on opponent entries not work in every scenario.
• Fixed several bugs in the stylesheet and how it loads (enqueues).

Please install the latest version through our WordPress Dashboard’s Plugins window or download it here.