Shoal Summit Solutions

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

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.

Leagues are handled by the League Manager plugin. See its Leagues man page.

The differences between the Premium and Free Versions of MSTW Bracket Builder are:

The Premium version supports single and double elimination tournaments of up to 16 teams with (optional) consolation games. The Free version supports basic single elimination tournaments of up to 64 teams. See the FAQ below for how the Premium version handles 64 team tournaments.

The free version is a manual system. That means you enter ALL the data that appears on the front end via the short codes. For example, if enter only the first round games on the Update Tourney Games admin screen, the second round games (and all following rounds) will be empty on the front end. You will have to enter the second round games as, says, “Game 1 Winner” vs “Game 2 Winner”, “Game 3 Winner” vs “Game 4 Winner”. Then when you mark the first round games as final, you have to update those games with the actual winners of the games. In the premium version, you only enter the games for the first round, the remaining games are automatically filled with “Game 1 Winner” etcetera, and when the games are marked final, “Game 1 Winner” is automatically replaced with the game’s winner based on the final scores provided.

The free version is a text-based system. That means there is no capability to enter team logos, for example. In fact, if in the first game the winning team is entered as “Team A”, it can be entered as “Team Alpha” in the next round, or the loser of the game can be entered as advancing. There are many opportunities for data entry errors. In the premium plugin, teams may be selected from the teams database, which is shared with the MSTW League Manager plugin. You enter a team’s information one time, then simply select it for use in multiple tournaments. Fast, simple, and error-resistant.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Is the plugin responsive?
The tournament brackets are not responsive. The tournament tables provide much better results on small screens.

Can I import the games I created in the free version to the premium version?
Not in the current versions of the plugins. This feature may be included in a future release.

How does the Premium version handle 64 team tournaments?
Most big tournaments, like the NCAA basketball tournament, are divided into “regions” of some sort. So create four 16 team tournaments, one for each “region”, then create another four team tournament for “the final four”.

Why aren’t 32 and 64 team double elimination tournaments supported?
First, because there aren’t many of them around (that I know of). Second, the required screen width would become WAY too big.

Help! My brackets and bracket lines are all screwed up. What can I do?
The first problem one might encounter is that the HTML container of the short code must be wide enough for the entire bracket. The table below provides the minimum size for each bracket size. Note that these numbers are not exact. You may be able to squeeze a few more pixels from each, especial the Free version.

If that looks okay, send me a link to your messed up page, and I’ll try to help you out.

The MSTW Bracket Builder plugin (premium version) is nearing completion. It will allow the quick and easy creation of single and double elimination tournaments. Check out the quick tour in this video.

In addition to the basics you see in the video, other features will include:

• A rich array of display settings to control tournament table and bracket formats.
• Integration with the MSTW League Manager plugin teams and venues. (But the MSTW League Manager plugin is NOT required for the Bracket Builder.)
• The ability to control table and bracket layouts with CSS.

If you’d like to try out a beta version before the end of the year, please contact me via e-mail, and we’ll see what can be done to help you out.

Version 1.4 of MSTW League Manager plugin was released last Friday. You can read about its new features on ShoalSummitSolutions.com. Three new MSTW League Manager tutorials are now available to Gold Support members:

• Standings Tables
• Multi-League Standings Tables
• The Settings Admin Screen

More League Manager tutorials will be available very soon, including:

• Using the Teams Database
• League Schedule Tables
• Team Schedule Tables
• Schedule Tickers & Sliders
• Shortcode Arguments

If you come across any bugs in this release, please report them through the support forums as soon as possible . Also, if you have ideas for new features that you’d like to see in the next release of League Manager, or any other MSTW plugin, please e-mail me. ([email protected])

This tutorial shows you how to create a League Schedule Gallery using the [mstw_league_schedule_gallery&rsqb; shortcode. It also demonstrates how to control the schedule gallery layout options, formats, links, column headings, and column positioning via the Settings admin screen

COMING SOON

Back to Tutorials

The schedule slider format may be controlled via the plugin’s Settings admin screen and via custom stylesheets. The biggest issue that arises “in the wild” is controlling the slider height. The default height (in /css/mstw-ss-styles.css) is 250px, which seems to work for many sites. However, the choices for the slider’s content – opponent icon, opponent name and format, game location and format, (media) links – can stretch the content from around 130 pixels to 300 pixels high. Unfortunately, I cannot adjust the slider height automatically for these choices due to some technical issues. (If someone can tell me how to do so, I am all ears, and there is a reward!)

So you may have to customize your slider(s) height in mstw-ss-custom-styles.css in your theme/child theme main directory. Here’s all you need to do:

.schedule-slider {
    height: 300px;  /* the height your site needs */
}

.ss-slider .content {
    height: 300px;  /* the height your site needs */
}

If you wish to change the height for a particular schedule slider, use the HTML tags with the schedule slug(s) in them:

.schedule-slider_your-schedule-slug {
    height: 300px;
}

.ss-slider .content_your-schedule-slug {
    height: 300px;
}

More or less complete control of the graphic design of the roster tables, the single player pages, and the player gallery pages may be obtained by editing the plugin’s style sheet /css/mstw-tr-style.css. Depending on your theme, it may also be necessary to edit the single-player.php and taxonomy-team.php templates to get everything to ‘fit’ just right.

Out of the box, the default stylesheet rules in mstw-tr-style.css control the displays. If you don’t want to mess around editing the stylesheet, significant control of the displays is provided through the Display Settings admin screen. NOTE that the admin page settings will override the corresponding styles in the mstw-tr-style.css stylesheet.

Finally, the plugin supports rules specific to individual teams. For example, all roster tables are in a .mstw-tr-table class, which is styled by the default rules, but each table is also in a .mstw-tr-table-team-slug class, which can be styled more specifically for individual. Because they are more specific than the ‘generic’ rules and the rules generated by the display settings, they take precedence over both in “the cascade” of CSS rules.

Combining the above techniques, significant graphic design control of all plugin output can be achieved, as shown on my MSTW Plugin Development Site.