Welcome to this tutorial about how to get started with the Sports Bench plugin. First off I have this blank demo website that I’ve set up. And I’m going to go in and install Sports Bench.
Okay, now that it has been installed and activated, we can now see the teams, playoffs, players, games and the Sports Bench options page. So we can go into here to set up the plugin.
So once you get into here you can select your sport. In this case I’m going to go with soccer. You can select the current season if the season is in progress. And this is where you would update that at the end of every year. If it’s a sport that is a fall to spring league, then you would check this box. And then you can set the current week it is. And if you’re using basketball and your league is scoring by halves like men’s college basketball, then you would check this box.
Next up we’re going to go into our display options. Here you would check this if you want to display games in the scoreboard bar or scoreboard page or scoreboard widget by week or leave it unchecked to display games by day or seven day periods. Next if you want to show a Google Map for the stadium the game is at, you can check this box, but do note that you will need a Google Maps API key which you can enter in right here. And then also you can add in an abbreviation guide at the end of any stats tables so that people can know what the actual stats are.
Next up, we’re going to go into Pages. Now before this I created Player, Team and Box Score pages that are empty. I’ll go over how to do that when I talk about teams, players and games. But for the moment I’m going to go and select those pages. And hit save. And I do want to note that once you do this, you will need to go into settings and permalinks and just hit the save button on those so that the permalinks for teams and pages work correctly.
Now if you’ve purchased Sports Bench, you should have received a license key and this is where you’ll go in to enter it and activate it so that you always get the updates that you need.
So that’s it for this tutorial. Next up we’re going to talk about how to create teams.