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

Sports Bench 2.3 released today

Sports Bench 2.3 is now available for download and ready to be updated on your website.

This update brings two new features into the plugin — play-by-play for basketball and a list view for the scoreboard page.

There’s also a minor update to fix a few bugs discovered if you’re using basketball for your website.

Let’s dive into what you can expect with Sports Bench 2.3.

Play-by-play for basketball games

The sports that can utilize the play-by-play feature grew by one in this update as basketball sites can use this for their games.

You can add in as many or as few of game events as you want to keep people up to date with what’s happening in a game. For example, you can only list the scoring plays. Or you can list every single thing that’s happening in the game.

From a technical perspective, the game info table for basketball changed drastically. The referees and techs columns have migrated to the game table with the game info table now containing the columns for play-by-play.

This might affect your website if you’ve customized any game output, so I recommend testing this in a staging or development environment first before updating the live site.

I should get to the remaining sports before the end of the year.

List view for team games

There is a new way to view games on the scoreboard page. Users can now have the option to see a grid or list view of games for the day or week.

The list view is a simple table designed to make things easier to read, rather than having to scroll down a potentially long way to see a game they are interested in. There’s a select field at the top of the page that will allow them to switch between views.

Website owners will be able to set a default view for the scoreboard page in the “Display” options. This view will be the one that shows when the page is loaded.

How to update to Sports Bench 2.3

Updating to Sports Bench 2.3 is super easy. You should already see the update notification inside your WordPress dashboard.

But before you run the update, you should take a backup of your website. Hopefully this is something that your web host offers you as a feature, but if not, you can use a plugin like BackupBuddy or UpdraftPlus to take a backup of your website. That way you can quickly restore the website if something breaks with the update.

Once the backup is finished, run the update. And then you can check your website for any issues or errors that have appeared from the update. If you do encounter any issues, please submit a ticket through the Report a Problem form on the website.

Roadmap for Sports Bench 2.4

So what can you expect with Sports Bench 2.4 coming up?

Well, I’m hoping to add in coaches that can be added to teams in a similar fashion to players. This would allow coach stats to also be tracked and help with an upcoming addition to the team history feature.

Also, I’m going to start on re-working the standings to make them more customizable for users as well as allow for access to historical data for your league.

And finally, football and potentially hockey will get access to the play-by-play feature, which should be a big help as we approach the start of the fall season for both sports.

If you have any new features you would like to suggest for future versions of Sports Bench, you can submit them through the Feature Request form. And if you run across any issues, you can submit a big report through the Report a Problem form on the site.

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