MSTW Bracket Builder version 1.0 is now available on wordpress.org. Check it out in action on the MSTW Dev site. The MSTW Bracket Builder plugin is intended as a complement to the MSTW League Manager plugin. While League Manager supports the creation and display of “group play” for tournaments or round robin tournaments, Bracket Builder supports the creation and display of “knockout rounds” or tournament brackets.

Define and configure tournaments, add the games, and use the shortcodes to display either “brackets” (aka “knockout rounds”) or “game tables” (aka “fixture tables”). Both front-end displays and their contents can be customized with CSS, and a (growing) set of shortcode arguments to reflect your site’s “brand”.

The plugin is now available, as is a library of man pages on this site. Video tutorials will be available for Gold Support members … hopefully soon. (Send in specific topics you’d like to see!)

So what’s next? Several extensions to the base League Manager and Bracket Builder plugins are planned:

• League Scheduler that will automatically create single and double round robin schedules, and assign venues to the games based on venue availability. View this as a running start; a schedule editor will be available to tweek schedules as necessary.
• Bracket Builder will support more tournament formats – double elimination, consolation games – and automatically update bracket displays based on reported final scores of games.
• Bracket Builder will be integrated with League Manager, so for example, tournament brackets can be automatically built for a league based on the league standings (seeding), and the front end displays can offer more information without duplicative data entry.
• League Live Scoring will allow fans at games to update game status in real-time. League scoreboards will display status updates without the need to be refreshed.

When? I don’t know, but as you can see, progress is being made. If you have a favorite on this list, let me know!

League Manager versions 1.2 & 1.3 were released in the past few days to address two bugs in the previous version(s).

Version 1.2 fixes the bug which prevented game times from displaying properly in the shortcode displays (times were rounded to hours and minutes where zero’ed).

If you have changed some some settings for a sport, but NOT the schedule table time format, you will need to change the schedule table time format to any other setting, save it, then reset it to what you want.

Version 1.3 fixes a bug that most users may never encounter. If a team was removed from a league (via the Teams admin screen), it continued to be displayed in that league’s standings table (shortcode). It would not appear in the Update Records admin screen for that league. In fact, the team could even be deleted, and its record would still appear in the standings table!! Please don’t ask. 🙂

However, the correction sometimes causes the [mstw_league_standings] shortcode to display a message for existing leagues (with perfectly good records) similar to the following:

No records found in league pac-12-south.

Fortunately, this problem is easily fixed. Just update the existing records for the league in question; that is, load them in the Update Records admin screen, and re-save them without change. This video demonstrates the problem, and shows you how to make the simple fix.