Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get the team logos to work in my schedule tables and sliders?
Team logos require use of the new Teams and Schedules Custom Data Types. While there is quite a bit of setup required to enable these new cool features, the setup work then makes it very easy to enter games. Please read the full documentation on this topic..

Why is the plugin called “Game Schedules”? Couldn’t I use it for other event schedules?
Sure. The software doesn’t know or care that the entries are “games”. The references are to “game schedule” and “sched_games”, only because that was original purpose of the plugin. Note however that it has no ‘calendar’ features, it just provides a simple list of events as a table.

Can I set up separate schedules for different teams and/or different seasons?
Yes. A unique schedule ID defines each schedule. It is the primary argument for shortcodes and the primary option for the widgets. For all practical purposes, you can set up many schedules as you want. So for example schedule ‘2012-varsity’ could be the varsity schedule 2012, schedule ‘2’ the JV in 2012, schedule ‘frosh-basketball’ the frosh in 2012, and schedules 4-6 could be the same teams in 2013. (Schedule ID’s must be in WordPress ‘slug format’. I suggest using descriptive slugs, but numbers would work just fine.)

I live in Split, Croatia (or wherever). Does the plugin support other languages?
The plugin supports localization as of version 2.0. If you happen to live in Split, you’re in luck. A Croatian translation is contained in the /lang directory. (Thanks Juraj!) A Spanish translation was added in version 2.4. (Thanks Roberto!) A Swiss German version is new to version 3.0. (Thanks Chris!) These translation files may need to be updated for version 3.0 and all its new features. A Finnish version will be added to the next release after 3.0, it is in the trunk now. (Thanks Lauri!) NOTE: Many more strings have been added in version 4.0 on both the front and back ends, so these translations need to be updated.

How do I change the look (text colors, background colors, etc.) of the schedule or the countdown timer?
Version 4.0 features a new set of color controls in the Display Settings admin screen. As in previous versions you can still edit the plugin’s stylesheet, mstw-gs-styles.css. It is located in the game-schedule/css directory. It is short, simple, and well documented. The schedule plugin and the schedule widget have separate sets of styles. The countdown plugin and countdown widget share one set of styles. Note that team specific styling tags have been added so if you have multiple teams, each schedule and slider can be customized using the stylesheet. For example, see [the examples on my dev site](https://shoalsummitsolutions.com/dev/).

How do I change the date-time group formats? [Day Month Year is more convenient in Europe.]
As of version 3.0, seven time and date formats can be customized via the Game Schedules Plugin Display Settings Admin page. Those seven formats were not enough to provide worldwide support, so new in version 4.0 is the ability to set any custom date format using the php date() function format strings.

The date-time formats are right, but my dates and times or the countdown time are not still not correct. What’s wrong?
The date and time displays on both the user and the admin pages as well as the countdown timer are driven by the default WordPress time zone, which is set on the WordPress Settings->General screen. It is important that you set the correct timezone in the WordPress Settings -> General Settings BEFORE entering any schedule data.

What can I do if I have more than three media links?
If you are that popular, why not create one media link on the schedule that goes to a page of all your links? Or, you can hack the plugin code. I’ve considered a setting for “number of media links” (the JV and Frosh teams typically have none, at least in San Diego), but that’s low on my list right now.

Can I display more than one schedule on a single page by using multiple shortcodes?
Yes. As of version 1.1 you can display multiple schedule tables and countdown timers on a single page using the [shortcodes].

All my data for a game got “zero’ed out”, what happened?
Either:

  • * You used the “Quick Edit” link in the list of all games (prior to version 2.0). Install version 2.0 or don’t do that!
  • * You edited a game, updated it, and when you exited the game editor, it asked if you really wanted to leave the page because there were unsaved changes. Knowing that you already saved the changes, you clicked on “leave this page”. Wrong! In this case you may not know best, just stay on the page and save the game again.
  • * You entered some really bad data for a game. It is particularly sensitive about the time format. (Install version 3.0. It fixed this issue!)

I keep getting weird error messages on the page with the sort code. Any idea what’s up?
These messages were caused by bad date-time data, and should be fixed in version 3.0. If you’re seeing such messages, please upgrade. If everything seems to be working okay except for these annoying error messages, you might want to turn them off on your WordPress site. To do so, edit wp-config.php and add the following lines:

error_reporting(0);

@ini_set(‘display_errors’, 0);

otherwise WordPress overwrites the ALERTS set by PHP.INI`