UPDATED: Works but lots of practical league issues to work around

UPDATE: The site has launched and it looks great. I have managed to get the importer to work for next season but with a couple of issues which have been raised on the ideas board and with support via email.

INTEGRATION UPDATE:
It would be great if the developer could add a set of templates to the documentation for integrating with third party themes. I struggled with this due to the way my usual web system works. Essentially – If the theme has a page builder and want to use it on SportsPress pages then you have to use the shortcodes. If not you will have to hard code page layouts in pages.php or teams.php venues.php etc etc.

One of the only sports management plugins for WordPress.
I chose this because of the positive reviews but there are a huge number of problems that make it difficult to manage entire leagues:I purchased SportsPressPro and use the Basketball add on.

The good bits:
Calendar feeds for each team mean that anyone in the league can see fixtures direct in their calendar specific to their team.

League tables and calculations work very well.

Presents everything professionally.

The bad bits:
Importing fixtures creates new fixtures and does not amend or overwrite identical ones. This has been on the feature request list for over 3 years with the most upvotes on the forum to improve imports. Without this feature it makes it very harder to manage a large league.

There is no built in exporter either.

Several shortcodes need adding to help make things more practical. I.e. Shortcode to display ical links, shortcode to display thinks like – a teams current division just on its own so it can be applied to every team template without manually updating each season.

Leagues do not auto archive, so if a team gets promoted from division 2 to division 1, the fixtures from the previous season and league tables stop working. Effectively the team gets removed from the division. You have to create a new set of divisions for each year in order to preserve the previous years fixtures and league tables.

The way teams are stored means that they appear in the same category as fixtures. This means the premium theme I use cannot distinguish between the two meaning I cannot display a list of teams by post category. You also cannot set a parent category for teams which breaks the breadcrumbs system in most themes.

The documentation to help with plugin integrations for non-sportspress themes is poor at best and assumes that you know the inner workings of the plugin. There are no code snippets, no example child theme to download from the documentation and there is no example integration. I will try downloading Rookie at some point to see if this helps in this process but generally speaking poor show.

Ultimately buy a sportspress theme if you want it to just work and look like one of the templates, but if you want to add a page builder or alter the layout in a modern wordpress way etc then expect a difficult and broken experience.

Speed:
This plugin has zero speed and performance optimisations.
Scripts for all components load on every page. Regardless of whether the element or shortcode has been used.
I recommend using a performance plugin like Wp-Optimize or WP-Rocket that can merge and minify stylesheets.
The FCP TTI and LCP scores are negatively affected by Sportspress.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by Thomas Jarvis. Reason: Website launched some issues resolved
• This topic was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by Thomas Jarvis. Reason: Updated to include speed settings