MSTW News Archive

Upcoming MSTW Plugin Releases

Happy Holidays to all and thank you for your support in 2018! A number of MSTW plugin releases with lots of cool new features, not to mention 1 or 2 bug fixes, are looming in 2019:

o MSTW Bracket Builder Premium version 1.3 has been released. Read more about it here.

o New releases of MSTW League Manager and League Manager Add-ons are coming very soon. They contain a number of new shortcodes, some back-end admin features, and some enhancements to better support those of you building sites on the MSTW plugin framework.

o More features for League Manager on both the front and back ends are in development and test. Expect to them this spring. (Sorry, no hints! But if there’s something you would really like to see, let me know now.)

o A minor build of Team Rosters is coming soon. In addition to a number of “maintenance items”, it will include a new shortcode for a player gallery view of a table of player photos.

o A major build of Team Rosters is planned for later this year. In fact, it will probably be an entirely new plugin in order to clean up a number of issues. It will update the plugin’s database structures so that rosters will work seamlessly with the League Manager teams. The plan is to migrate existing rosters – teams and players – to the new structure automagically.

Happy New Year!

Bracket Builder Premium 1.3 Released

MSTW Bracket Builder Premium version 1.2 has been released. A couple of rather large bugs have been corrected, a number of small ‘issues’ have been cleaned up, and the documentation, including the FAQ and Quick Start pages, has been updated, as well as a couple of new video Tutorials – Common Problems and Create Teams. If you have trouble downloading the latest version from this site using the link you received at purchase, please contact me and we’ll get it squared away.

NOTE: You should deactivate and delete version 1.1 before installing version 1.2. Any tournaments you have created with version 1.1 will be available in version 1.2, despite the warning about about “deleting the plugin and all its data”.

Patch for MSTW League Manager Version 2.4

I have been alerted to an annoying bug in MSTW League Manager v2.4 by a member of the MSTW community. (Thanks Michael.) If you are seeing messages like:

Warning: include_once(mstw-lm-duplicate-teams-class.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /your-site/wp-content/plugins/mstw-league-manager/includes/mstw-lm-admin.php on line 98

Warning: include_once(): Failed opening ‘mstw-lm-duplicate-teams-class.php’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/local/php56/pear’) in /your-site/wp-content/plugins/mstw-league-manager/includes/mstw-lm-admin.php on line 98

on your live site or your admin dashboard. They are caused by my carelessness in releasing the build. (Chalk it up to “trying to do too many things at once”.)

Other than being annoying, these warnings do not indicate any dysfunction in the plugin. So if you haven’t seen them, don’t worry about it. But if they are annoying you and you’d like to eliminate them, there are three ways to do so:

  1. If you are code savvy, you can open the mstw-lm-admin.php file in your site’s plugins/mstw-league-manager/includes directory and remark out line 98 that includes the mstw-lm-duplicate-teams-class.php file.
  2. Pull the mstw-lm-admin.php file from the development trunk on wordpress.org ( https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/mstw-league-manager/trunk/includes/ ). Right click on the file and select Save Link As from the pop-up menu. This is download the file to the location you choose.
  3. De-activate and delete the plugin from your site, and re-install and re-activate it.

League Manager 2.4 Released

MSTW League Manager version 2.4 is now available at WordPress.org (League Manager).

This release contains the following upgrades and bug fixes:

  • The Update Games screen can now be filtered by sport and date in addition to league and season. For example, it’s now easy to filter and update all the football games on a Friday night.
  • A bug was corrected in the Date Picker. It now functions properly across several screens.

League Manager 2.3 & Addons Available

MSTW League Manager and MSTW League Manager Add-ons version 2.3 are now available on WordPress.org (League Manager) and the MSTW Store (LM Addons).

MSTW League Manager 2.3 contains the following new features:

  • New multi schedule shortcode

    Either a leagues or a sport argument must be passed to the mstw_multi_schedule_table shortcode.

  • New sport schedule table

    shortcode mstw_lm_sport_schedule shortcode requires a "sport" argument.

  • Added new fields for games: “Game Name”, “Status Replace”,and “Status Append”. These fields modify the game time/status/result blocks in all front end displays: schedule tables, tickers, sliders, and galleries, and the single game page.
  • Modified the way mstw_multi_standings_table ‘remembers’ the value of the selected league. It no longer uses cookies.
  • Fixed a bug with the Google Maps link images in the Venue Table.

In this release, there is no new functionality in the addons, but the plugin has been modified to support new features in League Manager. It is always recommended that you keep the releases in sync.

The multi schedule shortcode

League:
Season:

No games found for specified league: league-slug-1, and season: .

provides functionality that is very similar to the multi standings shortcode. A drop-down control with the leagues (or groups in the case below) passed in the leagues argument, and a drop-down control with the seasons for those leagues are provided. The table then shows the schedule for the selected team in the selected season as shown in the screenshot below.

A typical way this might be used is to display the current and all the archived seasons for one league using relatively little screen space.

New Releases of League Manager & LM Addons

MSTW League Manager 2.2 and MSTW League Manager Add-ons 2.2 are now available on WordPress.org (League Manager) and the MSTW Store (LM Addons).

The MSTW League Manager Add-ons are designed for websites that use MSTW League Manager to maintain multiple league schedules, and large numbers of teams and games. MSTW League Manager 2.2 has been enhanced to better support the features of the LM Addons for large sites, but it will run just as before without the add-ons.

NEW in Version 2.2

  • The School (or organization) database allows Teams to be assigned to schools. Any missing team data – names, mascots, logos, etc. – is inherited from the teams’s school. This greatly reduces the data entry requirements when teams are moved forward to new years/seasons.

  • The Sport database allows Sports to be assigned to Schools. This association may then be used in page templates, which can greatly reduce the number of pages and their maintenance for websites with large numbers of leagues, schools, and teams.
  • Rosters from the MSTW Team Rosters plugin can be linked to a team. (Version 4.1.3 of Team Rosters is required to support this feature.)
  • Changed a ‘design decision’ that prevented more than 300 games from displaying properly in sliders and tickers.
  • A media icon (with link to a media file or website) can be displayed on schedule sliders, tickers, galleries, and scoreboards.
  • The display in the Media column in schedule tables when no media link is found now defaults to a blank (rather than “No media found.”), which allows the column to be ‘re-purposed’ more flexibly.
  • Added filters provide control over the message displayed when no media is found and when no location is found.

In addition, a SCHOOL Scoreboard shortcode has been added to the existing LM Add-ons shortcodes for TEAM sliders, SCHOOL sliders, SPORT sliders, and LEAGUE Scoreboards. TEAM, SCHOOL, and SPORT tickers and a SPORT scoreboard are on the drawing board for a future releases, which will be included as part of the plugin’s support. Read more about these features in the MSTW Store and on the MSTW League Manager Add-ons man pages.

MSTW Bracket Builder – New Release & Planned Builds

Version 1.1 of the MSTW Bracket Builder Premium plugin is now available. It is primarily a maintenance build, including:

  • Extensive work done in the plugin’s default stylesheet (/css/mstw-bb-styles.css). The tournament brackets display beautifully in my development theme (a WP Twentyeleven child theme). See http://dev.shoalsummitsolutions.com/t-test/. Some CSS work may be required for your theme. The primary driver is the width of the bracket’s containing element. It should be at least 750 pixels wide for basic single elim brackets and 900 pixels wide for double elimination brackets with consolation games.
  • Fixed bug that displayed -1 in the League column of tournaments table on the Tournaments screen when no league has been selected.
  • Fixed bug that displayed -1 as the team name when no games had been entered (updated) on the Update Games screen.
  • Updated the users manual. Check it out at https://shoalsummitsolutions.com/category/users-manuals/.

Upcoming versions of the MSTW Bracket Builder Premium plugin will include:

  • Restructure tournament set-up. The current tournament setup of the first round is awkward and non-intuitive. We will try to improve it. The improvements will also accommodate the two enhancements described below. If you have some suggestions, please send them along ASAP.
  • Better display of multiple first round BYEs. Ever build a 10 team tournament? It’s annoying to deal with six first round BYEs, and the team receiving the BYE can be advanced to the second round, the first round byes need not appear in the graphical display of the bracket.
  • Group or round-robin play. There have been many requests to better incorporate group play to fill the bracket (or knockout round). Round robin play can be handled with (small) leagues in MSTW League Manager. How we can do this without further complicating the first round setup remains to be seen, but we’ll push the rock some distance down the road.

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MSTW League Manager Add-ons 1.1

MSTW League Manager Add-ons 1.1 was released today. It is a minor release containing the following features and fixes:

  • Nonleague games are now shown by default. So you only need to use the show_nonleague argument if you DO NOT want to show nonleague games, then use show_nonleague=0 in the shortcode.
  • Media icon with link appears in all shortcodes when a game has a media link. (Update games or Manage Games screen).
  • All shortcodes now support multiple seasons.

If you have already purchased version 1.0 of the plugin, you should be able to download version 1.1 using the same link you received with your purchase. Otherwise, what are you waiting for? You can purchase the plugin from the MSTW Store.

MSTW League Manager 2.1

MSTW League Manager 2.1 was released today. It is a minor release containing the following features and fixes:

  • Nonleague games are now shown by default in all displays. So there is no need to use the show_nonleague=1 parameter. If you DO NOT want to show nonleague games, then set show_nonleague=0.
  • Games can now be marked as postponed in the DB and in the front end displays (shortcodes).
  • Fixed bug that prevented display of the media column’s data in schedule tables.
  • Minor clean-up of CSS stylesheets in a number of areas.

It should show up in your Dashboard Plugins page, or you can download it from WordPress.org.