| Updates
Sports Bench 1.7 released today
Sports Bench 1.7 is now available. Here’s what’s new in the newest update, including added functionality and support for a coming WordPress feature.
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Making keeping track of your sports league easy!
What is Sports Bench?
Sports Bench comes in two parts — a plugin and a theme. Both the plugin and theme work on their own; however, it’s suggested that you use both to get the most out of both products.
PLUGIN
Creating and keeping up with sports league stats on the internet can be a hassle. Fortunately, the plugin takes all of the hard work away from you. After a simple five-minute (or less) setup, you’re ready to start entering teams, players, games and even division and then watch the plugin do all of the other stuff for you. Sports Bench takes care of accumulating the stats you enter as well as the standings and schedules.
The plugin has the ability to display the standings, a scoreboard of all game for the current season and statistical leaderboards. Show off game stats next to a recap of a game. Easily create pages for teams and players. And shortcodes allow you to show game, player or team information in any post. And if you use the Sports Bench theme, all of this comes with minimal front-end coding work for you. You have enough to worry about with managing your sports league; let us take care of the hard part.
THEME
The Sports Bench theme is the perfect way to use the Sports Bench plugin out of the box with no need to add any code to make the core functionality work. The Sports Bench theme includes page templates for the standings, scoreboard, stats leaderboards, teams and players. It also includes the scoreboard bar, a featured post slideshow, infinite scrolling posts on the homepage and implements the longform post feature included in the Sports Bench plugin.
SPORTS SUPPORTED:
- Baseball
- Basketball
- Football
- Hockey
- Rugby
- Soccer
- Volleyball
Features
Plugin
Team Page
Sports Bench makes it easy for you to have a centralized location for each team in the league with team pages. If you’re using the Sports Bench theme, this requires no setup. But even if you’re not, our functions and guides will have you setup with a team page template that will match your theme in no time.
Player Page
This plugin also makes it easy for you to have a centralized location for each player in the league with player pages. If you’re using the Sports Bench theme, this requires no setup. But even if you’re not, our functions and guides will have you setup with a player page template that will match your theme in no time.
Playoffs
You can now easily create playoff brackets to show who your league’s champion is. Create a 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 32 or 64 team single elimination bracket or a four-team double elimination bracket. And the front end display is easy. Just select the playoff shortcode, select the bracket and watch it do its work. The display is written to work with any size screen, so all of your readers will be able to see who the true champion is.
Standings
Show where teams are in the standings with ease. The plugin keeps track of the standings with minimal need for user input. You can show league, conference or division standings, whichever works for you.
Divisions
Sports Bench makes it easy to organize teams via conferences and/or divisions. Simply add the division or conference and then sort the teams into them.
Scoreboard
Display upcoming, current or completed games with an easy-to-use scoreboard. You can create a separate scoreboard page with only the need to call one function, or you can add a scoreboard bar to the top of your header.
Stats Leaderboard
Show who’s the best in different statistical categories with Sports Bench’s stats leaderboard. Simply select which stats you wish to show and they’ll show up on the page. The stats show the top ten players, but users can load more for each stat with a simple click.
Stat Search
Need to figure out what the record is for a particular stat? Need to see if anybody’s done something before? You and your visitors can search for stats with an easy-to-use player stat search. This can be used on the front and back end so anyone can look up just about any stat.
Game Recaps
Show off stats from a game in a nice sidebar area to go along with a post. It’s perfect for a game recap, where the text or even video recap can be in the main area with the stats off to the side. The recap stats are made to be used with any sidebar to match the theme you are using.
Widgets
Sports Bench comes with three ready-to-go widgets to display in the sidebar. You can display standings, the scoreboard and the leaderboard for a stat in the sidebar. The widgets are also created to blend with you sidebar to match the theme.
Gutenberg Blocks
The plugin comes with custom Gutenberg blocks ready to go when the new Gutenberg editor is rolled into WordPress core. These blocks can be used to show page templates, games, playoff brackets, rivalries and more!
Shortcodes
The plugin also comes with 11 different shortcodes that you can use to display information in a post. In the post editor, click the ‘SB’ logo to open up a modal where you can select between a game, team, player, scoreboard, standings, stats, playoff bracket, rivalry, player page, team page or game recap shortcode to display information to add to your posts.
WP REST API Integration
JavaScript frameworks and the WP REST API are the hot thing in web development. If you’re creating a site that uses the REST API and any of the popular frameworks, Sports Bench has the tools to help you.
CSV Import
Already have a database set up for your league? Well we make it easy for you to bring it over and set up with Sports Bench. Simply export each table you need – divisions, games, game info, game stats, players, brackets, series and teams – and use our CSV uploaded to add the information. The CSV import page will walk you through the process to make sure you’re all set. And if you need to migrate your site, you can also export each of the tables into a CSV file to safely move the data to another site with Sports Bench or just for safe keeping.
The plugin part of Sports Bench does it all for your sports league. Enter players, teams and games and let Sports Bench give you all of the stats, standings and anything else you could want.
The theme part of Sports Bench features a homepage slider, a wide layout, a clean look and perfect integration with the plugin.
Theme
Sports Bench Plugin Integration
The Sports Bench theme is designed and coded with the Sports Bench plugin in mind. While the theme works on its own like any other WordPress theme, it works best with the plugin. This is perfect for users with no coding experience as everything has already been taken care of. Simply activate the theme and plugin, setup the plugin options and you’re on your way.
Homepage Slider
Show off your best or most important stories with the featured post slider on the homepage. Simply select a category in the theme options and add posts to that category to see them displayed in the full-width slider. You can control how many posts are shown on the slider. The preferred image ratio is 2.56:1, with a relatively large image so that it stretches across the page.
Customizable Homepage
Readers won’t have to go very far to find your stories when they come to your website. In addition to showing your latest posts, you can also add tabs for selected categories so readers can peruse them without leaving the homepage.
Infinite Scroll
Your readers won’t have to worry about the hassle of navigating through pages of posts to find their favorite stories thanks to infinite scroll. Readers will just have to keep scrolling down in order to load more posts rather than wait for a new page to load, saving them time and frustration. This works on the home and archive pages.
Custom Header
Add your personal branding to the website with a custom logo. The logo displays on the left side of the top menu. The suggested size for the header is 200px by 40px.
Site Logo
In addition to the site header, you can also add branding with a custom site logo. The logo will appear down in the footer and can also be added into templates wherever you need it. WordPress advises that the site logo be 512px by 512px.
Social Media Links
Show off links to your social media sites in the header with ease. Simply enter the URL for the desired social media platform in the theme options and the image and links will automatically appear in the header.
Longform Template
Have a special story that you want to tell in a special way? Sports Bench makes that easy with the longform feature. Select the longform post template in the “Post Attributes” section of the post editor to see your story displayed in a unique way.
Home Page - Slider
Homepage Tiled
Single Post
Single Post Game Recap
Single Post Game Preview
Longform Post
Page
Archives
Teams
Single Team
Players
Single Player
Standings
Scoreboard
Stats
Playoffs
Dashboard Widgets
Options Page
Custom Fields
Stats Admin Page
Standings Admin Page
Teams Admin Page
Single Team Admin Page
Players Admin Page
Single Player Admin Page
Games Admin Page
Single Game Admin Page
Playoffs Admin Page
Single Playoff Bracket Admin Page
Learn More About Sports Bench
One of the best parts of Sports Bench is how customizable it is, especially the plugin. Developers will be able to do almost anything they want with the data. To help you figure out how to accomplish your goals with your sports website, we’ve put together an extensive codex with all of the available functions and variables, a great set of how to guides and demo videos. Click the links to the left to get started!
See the Demo
Want to see this theme in action before downloading it? Click the button below to go to see the demo site with the theme in all it’s glory. The demo will allow you to see all the features in action before deciding whether to use it or not. So give it a try!
View The DemoPricing Information
Plugin Only
- Includes both the plugin and the theme.
- The functionality for the plugin is built into the theme, eliminating the need to write code or shortcodes to get going.
- Sports Bench specific page templates, like the Stats, Standings, Scoreboard, Team and Player pages, are already built.
- A full codex to help you extend and customize both the theme and plugin to fit your needs.
$25.00
Plugin and Theme
- Comes with all the functionality you need to run your sports website with stats, standings, games and more.
- Written in a way to make it seamlessly integrate with any properly written WordPress theme, especially with styling.
- Easily customizable so that it can fill the needs you have.
- A full codex to help you extend and customize the plugin to fit your needs.
$35.00
Theme Only
- Nice, clean and modern WordPress theme.
- The ability to chose between a slider or tiled posts at the top of the homepage.
- A homepage full of posts from categories you select.
- Display your social media icons so people can connect with you.
- A full codex to help you extend and customize the theme to fit your needs.
$10.00
Other Documentation
From the Blog
| Tutorials
Adding a Google Map to games
Showing information before a game happens is great. But what about if you could show a Google Map to show where the game is taking place?
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| Tutorials
Customizing game preview information
The game preview areas are likely an area that you’re going to want to customize on your site. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to do.
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