MSTW League Manager 1.0 Released!

MSTW League Manager version 1.0 is now available on wordpress.org. Check it out in action on the MSTW Dev site.

Standings Table

For years league admins have been trying to fit MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards (the square peg designed for single teams, organizations, schools) into their league sites (the round hole), and not surprisingly things don’t quite fit. The MSTW League Manager plugin was created to address the needs of LEAGUE websites and admins. Create multiple leagues, and multiple seasons for each league. Create game venues, teams (with home venues and logos). From there, create league standings tables and/or create league games, and then scheduled and results tables. The tables and their contents can be formatted via a rich set of Display Settings, and front-end displays can be customized with CSS.

Schedule Gallery

The plugin is now available, as is a library of man pages on this site. Some video tutorials will be available for Gold Support members … hopefully soon.

Schedule Table

So what’s next? Several extensions to the base League Manager are planned:

  • A League Scheduler that will automatically create single and double round robin schedules, and assign venues to the games based on venue availability. View this as a running start; a schedule editor will be available to tweek schedules when necessary.
  • A Bracket Builder that will automatically create single and double elimination tournament brackets.
  • League Live Scoring will allow fans at games to update game status in real-time. League scoreboards will display status updates without the need to be refreshed.

When? I don’t know, but if you have a favorite on this list, let me know!

Coming Soon … League Manager

I have been contacted many times by admins attempting to use the MSTW plugins, especially MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards, for LEAGUES. The plugins were designed for a single team or a single school, not for leagues; so they are far from a perfect fit for leagues. So about a month ago, I finally decided to build a new MSTW League Manager plugin. Here are the basic features with some screenshots of the development version. If you have comments or suggestions, feel free e-mail them to me (but no promises!).

Basic Front End Features (not pretty yet, but you’ll get the idea):

Back End (Admin) Features:

  • Add multiple games on one admin screen
  • Update multiple games on one admin screen
  • Import teams from MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards (or your own spreadsheet)
  • Import games from MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards (or your own spreadsheet)
  • Individual Settings for each league – points calculations, order & display of columns, and much more
  • Hierarchical Leagues, for example NFL <-- AFC <-- East, West, North, South

Last but not least, and this will NOT be in version 1, I’m looking at a league scoreboard with LIVE UPDATES when games are in progress.

The plugin will NOT be feature complete in time for high school basketball season, but if you are interested in working with a BETA version for this basketball season, please let me know.

Schedules & Scoreboards 1.4.1 Released

MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards 1.4 was released last week, followed today by version 1.4.1*. See the previous post for the new functionality in 1.4. Version 1.4.1 corrects the following bugs:

  • Corrected a bug that prevented the schedule slider from starting at the next upcoming game. [Thanks, Jay. I can always count on you. 🙂 ]
  • Corrected bugs with the slider custom date & time formats. (Most users would never encounter these, but they are fixed.)
  • Updated the master translation file /lang/msw-schedules-scoreboards-en_US.pot [Sorry Anders, let me know what I missed!]

*Generally, I use version 1.X for changes in functionality and 1.X.Y for releases with bug fixes but no significant new functionality. Always read the changelog and the upgrade notice (in the readme.txt) before upgrading. If you don’t need it, you don’t need it.

Schedules & Scoreboards 1.4

Schedules & Scoreboards version 1.4 will be released very soon. Before deciding to upgrade, you may want to review the following information on the new features and how to upgrade from 1.3.

NEW FEATURES

– Show Sport on Schedule Tables and Sliders
This feature is for school sites that want to display all in-season sports on a single schedule table or slider. It adds the sport name and a “vs” or “@” to the schedule table or slider as shown in the screenshots below.

Schedule Table Showing Sportt

Schedule Slider Showing Sport

This feature is only available via the show_sport shortcode argument. There is no display setting on the Settings admin screen.

Something very similar can be accomplished using the show_schedule_name shortcode argument. However, this capability restricts schedule names, and does not include “vs” for home games and “@” for away games.

– CSV Import – Select Team to Import
Games can be imported as before without any change to the existing CSV file formats. However, if you are importing only one team’s schedule, and you do not want to add the game_sched_id column to your CSV file, there is a new control to specify the schedule to import. All games with an empty game_sched_id field (or if that column is not in the CSV file at all) will be imported to the selected schedule.

CSV Import - Teams & Games

– CSV Import – Import Team Logos
The controls for team logos has been changed. You may choose to move the logo image files, as specified in the team_logo and team_alt_logo columns, from an existing server or site to the Media Library of a new site. Or you may choose not to move the image files, normally because they already exist in the site’s Media Library. This functions exactly like the player photos in the Team Rosters CSV import. (There have been no changes to the CSV file formats.)

UPGRADE CAVEATS

Upgrades are fairly straightforward, MUCH more so than 1.3, but there are a couple of things to be careful about when upgrading.

– CSS Changes. Release 1.3 allowed you to put your site’s CSS customizations in the mstw-ss-custom-styles.css stylesheet in your theme’s main directory. If you have done so, then your customizations will NOT be overwritten upon upgrade. However the HTML ID’s and classes have changed, and the default CSS stylesheet has been simplified. Therefore any CSS customizations for the Schedule Table and Countdown Timer WIDGETS may be required. These changes simplify the style rules and decrease the size of the default stylesheet, thereby improving the plugin and your site.

– “Cheatin’ uh?” Message. This is a ‘standard’ message comes from the WordPress Roles & Capabilities system. The MSTW Plugins create two custom Roles, and a number of new capabilities. (Read more on how to use these Roles here.) Upon plugin activation, the proper capabilities are assigned to the custom roles, AND to the WP Administrator and Editor Roles. However, for reasons that I do not yet understand, the custom capabilities are sometimes not properly assigned to the WP Administrator and Editor Roles. The easiest way to fix this problem is to deactivate and reactivate the plugin.

– Updated Common Library. The mstw-utility-functions.php library is used by all the MSTW plugins. This design offers a number of advantages. However, the latest version of the library is not necessarily loaded when the plugin is activated, and this can cause errors. To ensure that the latest version of the library is loaded, deactivate all the MSTW plugins, activate the new MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards plugin, then re-activate the other plugins.

League Standings 1.3 Released

Version 1.3 of the MSTW League Standings plugin was just released to address two bugs:

1. Under certain circumstances, standings could be incorrect due to a sorting error. For example, when sorting by rank, 1, 2, 04, 4, 16, 21 could sort incorrectly (alphabetically instead of numerically) as 04, 1, 16, 2, 21, 4.

2. A perfect win percentage would display as 1. It now displays as 1.000.

Team Rosters v4.0.1 Released

Version 4.0.1 addresses the following issues:

  1. The CSV Import function was incorrectly importing Bats/Throws.
      
  2. The display of ‘B’ for bats was incorrect after import. (This was not related to the import problem above.)

    Note: There has been a request to change switch hitters from Bats – ‘B’ (both) to ‘S’ (switch). I do not plan to tail chase this terminology as sites such as MLB.com change it. The ‘B’ for bats both is translation ready. You can simply create a en_US translation with one entry ‘B’ -> ‘S’, and you’ve got it.

  3. In some scenarios, the front end shortcodes generated WordPress WARNINGS. There are several ways to fix this on your site, but it is now corrected in v4.0.1.

Team Rosters 4.0 – New FAQs

Based on feedback from some of you, here are a couple of new FAQs:

I installed version 4.0 (without reading the fine manual) and all my data is gone! @*?*$^&#!! Please tell me I did not lose 3 years of data!
No, you did not lose your data, you just can’t see it via version 4.0 of the plugin. Deactivate version 4.0 (I don’t believe you have to uninstall it.) and reinstall version 3.1.2, which is available on wordpress.org. You will have to download the zip file and install it as a zip file. Then follow the upgrade instructions in the users manual.

Why do I get the message “Cheatin’ huh?” when I try to access some admin screens after installing version 4.0?
This problem is related to the WP Roles & Capabilities system and the MSTW roles & capabilities that control access to the Team Rosters admin screens. The appropriate MSTW capabilities are assigned to the Administrator role when the plugin is activated (and only then). So assuming you are logged in as an administrator, de-activating and re-activating the plugin usually does the trick.

Why do I get the following message on some front-end displays, e.g., Player Galleries?

Warning: array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, string given in /home/mdorum/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/team-rosters/includes/mstw-tr-utility-functions.php on line 755

I believe this only occurs when viewing the front end displays BEFORE accessing the back end Team Roster admin screens AND MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards is active. I believe simply visiting the Team Roster admin pages (any page) fixes this problem. (Please let me know if it doesn’t.)

I have patched this issue. If you pull the includes/mstw-tr-utility-functions.php file from the development tree, this problem is corrected there.

Finally, these messages were WARNINGS, not ERRORS (which “white screen” the site). While I work hard to eliminate such messages, they should not harm your site, because they should be disabled completely or directed to the debug.log file on a live site. Information on managing these messages is readily available on the web, including on shoalsummitsolutions.com.

Team Rosters 4.0 Now Available

Team Rosters 4.0 is now available. Cool new features include:

  • Improved customization options for team colors and logos.
  • Improved options for customizing both the colors (CSS sytlesheets)
  • Improved options for customizing the player gallery and single player bio templates.
  • Increased integration with MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards plugin. Team logos and colors may now be pulled from that plugin’s data tables.
  • Re-organized the admin (Display) Settings screen into several tabs.

THE DATA STRUCTURES FOR PLAYERS AND TEAMS HAVE CHANGED. So if you plan to upgrade from version 3.1.2, PLEASE READ THE USERS MANUAL BEFORE UPGRADING. There are steps you will have to take in order to preserve your existing data via the MSTW CSV Exporter plugin.

The man pages are up to date. If you are upgrading, you might want to start with the Upgrading to Team Rosters 4.0 man page. Five video tutorials are available to MSTW Gold Members. They cover upgrading from version 3.1.2 and the associated data migration, AND new ways to customize the plugin’s displays – roster tables, player galleries, and player profiles.

Upgrading from 3.1.2 to 4.0
Migrating Data from v3.1.2
Customizing Colors in v4.0
Customizing Team Logos in v4.0
Customizing the Single Player and Player Gallery Templates

SF Giants Roster Table

SF Giants Player Gallery

Buster Posey

MSTW CSV Exporter 1.2 Released

MSTW CSV Exporter 1.2 is now available. It is CRITICAL to upgrading Team Rosters from version 3.1.2 to version 4.0. New features include:

  • Version 1.2 provides the ability to export the MSTW Team Rosters (v3.2.1) data structures – Players and Teams – for import to MSTW Team Rosters v4.0. It allows player photos to be moved from site to site automagically in the import/export process (or not if you are upgrading Team Rosters on one site). See [the Team Rosters CSV Import man page](https://shoalsummitsolutions.com/tr-loading-csv-files/) for more information.
  • Exports MSTW Team Rosters v4.0 data for backup and data migration across websites.

NOTE: THE TEAM ROSTERS DATA STRUCTURES FOR PLAYERS AND TEAMS HAVE CHANGED IN VERSION 4.0. So if you plan to upgrade from version 3.1.2, PLEASE READ THE USERS MANUAL BEFORE UPGRADING. There are steps you will have to take in order to preserve your existing data.

Please see the MSTW CSV Exporter users manual at ShoalSummitSolutions.com for more information.

Team Rosters Update

Team Rosters version 4.0 is on schedule for a late spring release. This update has a few front end enhancements, but the focus is on ‘admin issues’, specifically integration other MSTW plugins and increased customization options.

The tutorials listed below are available on the the shoalsummitsolutions.com Support -> Tutorials page.

Customizing Team Colors

There are three ways to customize the colors in the Team Rosters v4.0 plugin: the colors tab on the Settings admin page, writing custom CSS rules where the stylesheet can now be in the theme/child theme directory, and a new setting to automatically set the table colors from the MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards teams database. [Video Tutorial]

Cal Roster Table

Customizing Team Logos

There are three ways to customize the team logos (and default images when no player photo is found) in Team Rosters v4.0: use the logos in the MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards database, set the default logos in the plugin’s /images/default-images/ directory, or set the default logos in the theme or child theme’s /mstw-team-rosters-images/ directory (which you create). [Video Tutorial]

Buster Posey

Customizing the Single Player & Player Gallery Templates

The default Single Player and Player Gallery templates are located in the plugin’s /theme-templates/ directory. Usually, only some CSS modifications are required to make these templates “fit” in a theme. Occasionally, these templates require code modifications to meet a sites requirements. In version 4.0, the plugin’s default templates never need to be modified. Rather, one should create custom templates in the theme’s (or child theme’s) main directory. By doing so, the customizations are not overwritten when a plugin update is loaded. If a child theme is used, they are not overwritten by a theme update either. [Video Tutorial]