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 while there’s some code you’ll need to write in order to get the full extent of Sports Bench, we’ve included an extensive starting guide to help you get going.
What Can Sports Bench Do For You
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.
Customizations
Beginning with Sports Bench 1.5, customizations just got a whole lot easier. To customize the styling, simply create a ‘sports-bench’ directory inside your theme and then a custom.css file inside the new directory. Any styles there will overwrite the default Sports Bench styling. And there are now over 102 filters you can use to customize the output of Sports Bench. You can learn more about the new filters on our Codex page.
What Can You Do With Sports Bench?
Basically anything. Sports Bench is written to work for you, so you can leverage it to do basically anything you want or need it to do. If you’re technically inclined or know WordPress, PHP and/or JavaScript, we have extensive documentation on our website in addition to the documentation inside the plugin file itself.
A Place to Get Help
Need help using or developing with Sports Bench? We have the place for you. On our website, we have a codex, a bunch how to’s and a forum where you can ask for help or meet others who are using Sports Bench. It’s a great resource to solve your Sports Bench problems.
If you run into any questions, concerns or problems or have a feature request for a future release, please check out our Forums page.