An Apple iMac showing the Sports Bench Soccer homepage on a white desk in a white room

Sports Bench 2.2 released with two new features

The first major release for Sports Bench in 2022 is here!

Sports Bench 2.2 brings a few fixes and a few big additions to your website, especially if you have a baseball website.

So let’s dive into what’s in Sports Bench 2.2.

Play-by-play feature for baseball

The play-by-play feature has made its way over to baseball here in Sports Bench 2.2.

If you run a baseball league, you can now add in what each player does during the inning, from how they got out or scored a run to a pinch hitter coming into the game or a defensive replacement. You can also show what the count was when the ball was put into play.

On the front end, the play-by-play section will have two tabs: all plays and scoring plays, allowing readers to view everything or just see how the runs were scored.

Please note that you will still need to manually add in the team and player stats. I hope to potentially make that more automatic after rolling out the play-by-play feature to all sports.

Team manager user role

Also new for Sports Bench 2.2 is the team manager user role you can apply in WordPress. You can add in a new user, like a coach in the league, and give them the “team manager” role instead of the editor or author role that are already available.

The team manager role mimics the WordPress author role; however, you can also select what team they manage. For the Sports Bench pages (teams, games, players), they will only be able to edit their team or players on their team or games their team is playing in. They will not be able to add in new teams, players or games.

This will come in handy if you want to have the coaches add in stats for games after they are completed rather than doing it yourself.

Road map for Sports Bench 2.3

So with Sports Bench 2.2 out the door, what can you expect with Sports Bench 2.3?

Right now I’m planning to add in a list view for the scoreboard and games. Also, I’m at least going to start re-working how standings are done to give users more control in how to build them and how teams are ordered (win percentage or points). Finally, I do hope to continue building on the play-by-play feature for more sports and the team history feature.

The plan at the moment is for a late May or early June release for Sports Bench 2.3. But stay tuned to the blog for more updates.

How to safely update to Sports Bench 2.2

There shouldn’t be any breaking issues when updating to Sports Bench 2.3; however, there are always risks when updating any WordPress plugin or theme.

In order to protect your website, make sure that you take a backup of your website first. That way you can restore your website to a pre-update state in case anything goes wrong.

If you do run into an issue with Sports Bench after updating, please report the issue through the Report a Problem form.

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