Today there is variety of entertainments and it’s not so easy to attract new website visitors and what even more difficult is to keep visitors on the website. This is particularly true for sport web portals, intense rivalry makes owners to implement new solutions. One of the sure-fire solutions is Gambling. Gambling has been staying popular since pre-historic times of Ancient India, it lures people in all corners of the world at all times. By references to this fact BearDev team decided to develop almost indispensable functionality for entertaining Sport website visitors!

Let us to introduce tool for Joomla based websites – JoomSport add-on, Joomla Sports Predictions that has been just released and is already available in our WebShop.

The add-on allows creating prediction leagues and adding matches from JoomSport seasons. Once JoomSport matches are marked as played, users will gain their points depending on league settings and predictions submissions.

JoomSport Predictions add-on Features

• Enable predictions option for chosen JoomSport leagues;
• Set up point system for each league separately;
• Allows any registered Joomla user to make predictions;
• Display Users Leaderboard according to prediction results;
• Individually stats for each user;
• Provides simple and intuitive configuration.

Check how the features work on predictions add-on demo or read the documentation available.

The change log of the released JoomSport for Joomla update 4.0.19 includes many improvements and number of important bug fixes.

Welcome the new UI improvements - clear and accurate.

After number of similar requests from our customers JoomSport product team decided to improve the front end UI of all JoomSport pages slightly. We have removed the component border and the color from the component header. We also commented the back navigation link in the source code. Normally customers use browser back function for such action. If you still need it you can remove comments from code. New default venue image is added. Some other minor front end and back end UI improvements are also delivered.

So the final result - clear and nice UI on all pages that fit any Joomla theme in better way and are not overloaded with extra design items.

Release compatibility with new Joomla sport Predictions add-on.

Following our customer's requests we have extended JoomSport with special add-on that allows your site visitors to make match predictions and then to monitor who is the prediction leader once matches are played. This is just a perfect way to improve your sport league or club site visitors engagement. Add-on is available with 30% discount at our shop for a limited period of time. Special thanks to Ukranian AnimaUnity project for powering up this JoomSport extension!

Template override method.

If you are looking for overriding the native JoomSport html views and don't want to loose it during JoomSport updates, now you have this ability supported by JoomSport developers. The new method is described in JoomSport FAQ section.

New translations inside

At this stage JoomSport is partially translated in over 18 languages. The present release contains updates for Italian, Russian, Slovenian, Slovak, Polish, Spanish and some others. Are you interested to support us on your local language translation? Join our translators team in Transifex!

Issue fixes delivered:

• Team drop down in matchday CSS 
• Extra time score points counting
• Highlight your team in the season table module doesn't work
• Players from deleted season are displayed on team page FE for all seasons
• Player list menu item for all seasons cannot be created
• Venue address is not displayed on FE
• Error once you try to re-save Matchday with updated match status
• Sort by extra field doesn't work in Player list menu item
• Tooltip class name changed to avoid conflicts with 3rd party templates

Please download the new 4.0.19 version from your Members Area and install it on your website. Pay your attention that Season table module need to be updated as well.

Summer is great for all kinds of sports and it is especially suitable for outdoor activities, just like running, jumping, cycling, and … swimming, of course. Today we are talking to Michael Badulescu, CTO of Swisswaterpolo.com about the latest enhancements implemented for the national water polo web site by the BearDev team.

MICHAEL BADULESCU
Swiss Waterpolo, Chief Technical Director

BearDev: We know Switzerland as the country of a thousand lakes. As far as Swimming is greatly popular among Swiss people, would you say the same regarding water polo?
MB: Unfortunately, it is not so popular as Swimming, but we are growing slowly. Water polo in Switzerland is quite small community with about 1’500 licensed players. The competitions are played in swimming pools, so the numbers of lakes doesn’t help us a lot.

JoomSport WordPress sport plugin Alfa version is ready and submitted for internal testing. In the nearest future we will announce Beta version for public Beta testing, details about beta testing you can find on our forum. To stay informed about the WordPress Sport plugin development subscribe to appropriate blog category.

The first Stable release will contain almost all features that are included into JoomSport for Joomla, still some of them are postponed to the future releases to improve the initial delivery time. The second major release is planned for the end of 2016 and will include such major features as:

• Knockout type of competition
• Front End league management
• eSport settings
• player and team registration via Front End

Future WordPress plugin Road-map includes:

• Match Generator add-on
• Double elimination type of competition
• Ability to copy Season with all settings and participants

Compare editions page contain the full details about the features planned.

The change log of released JoomSport minor update 4.0.17 includes minor bug fixes and improvements, among them:

• Season standings layout - by group filtering fix
• Player images thumbs display improvement on Team layout (players tab, option with player photos)
• Season table module by group filtering fix

 Please download new 4.0.17 version from your Members Area and install on your website. Pay your attention that Season table module need to be updated as well.