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.

We are pleased to announce that new version of Match Generator add-on is already available. Based on customers’ requests we have done the following implementations:

• Group Dividing. Now matches can be generated as between participants of one group as for all participants of the season (regardless of the group)
• Participant order. Check user friendly drag and drop feature for sorting participants before generate matches
• Minor improvements: Interface updates, language fixes, design issues etc.

Please buy the add-on in our web shop or download your copy from members area.

Soon, our whole team will celebrate a new global update of our flagship product JoomSport.

The updated product was inspired by our customers and created for them entirely. We’ve made a lot in order to meet most of your voiced needs and allow you to enjoy the new look and feel of the extension. 

This update, intended for both JoomSport admins and fans, drastically rebuilds the product’s back end and front end. And today we are going to unveil the main features that are going to make JoomSport greatly a new extension.

Latest JoomSport Features

Bootstrap Based Layout

Most importantly, the updated extension has a new advanced tech stack with Bootstrap 3 as the central element. It delivers consistent look for many standard web items, makes the layout of the product fully-responsive and provides you with great user experience on all mobile devices.

Responsive Add-on is included 

As far as the front end of the extension is based on Bootstrap that doesn’t require developing a stand-alone product for mobile devices, we’ve included Responsive Add-on into the package by default and for free.

Back end Usability

The update improves almost all the sides of our product since the front end and back end improvements go together just hand in hand.

Among other things, the new backed includes a streamlined navigation, convenient and clear configuration, and user-friendly design. The new logical organization of options and their improved appearance flat-out saves your time and efforts.

JoomSport back end menu

Easy Learning Process

While creating the new back end design and new level of usability we considered the entire process of the extension configuration both as a daily routine and learning. Every-day routines are just about experience, while learning requires passion. So, our idea was to make our back end more usable and involving simultaneously.

As a result, now even beginning users will quickly embrace the logic of particular operations and the overall workflow of the JoomSport extension. The whole back end contains numerous notifications, information links, and explanations. The provided documentation contains step-by-step guides linking to even more detailed tutorials, if necessary.

Most fans have their favorite kinds of sports or sports leagues and naturally want to follow them online, among other things. Consequently, web site owners need to provide them with a smooth transition from off-line mass media to online sport leagues and vice versa. 

However, online league user experience should give them even more opportunities to get plentiful and detailed information regarding their favorites (players, teams or championships), to socialize, comment and discuss current and past results, to feel in the thick of things, events and people.

It is certainly a complicated task requiring professional sports software. For Joomla web site owners below we present 15 hints to ease this burden and fine-tune league web sites to get plentiful grateful feedback from visitors.

To this purpose you can take advantage of the dedicated software products by BearDev including Joomla! CMS sport extension, JoomSport add-ons and dedicated Joomla templates able to provide you with all necessary features and beyond.

1. Responsive Layout

Nowadays, responsive interface is a mandatory component of great user experience enabling visitors to stay in touch with their hobby or professional activity on the 24/7 basis. Responsive design also makes your Google desktop and mobile rankings more successful.  

JoomSport hint: In order to correspond to the best examples of UI you have to implement responsive Joomla CMS templates, e.g. Joomla responsive sport template Kodiak. You should also make sure that all the extensions used on your site are also responsive. For that you can utilize the JoomSport responsive add-on making all your sport pages mobile friendly.

2. Teams Branding

Team logos added to their names makes content perception more convenient allowing fans to find their teams in seconds within the crowded calendars and Standings.

JoomSport hint: The smallest acceptable size of logo images is 30x30 px. The recommended size of logos in the new coming JoomSport release will be 100x100 px.

3. Photos in Web Site Style

Already known, that users perceive visuals much better than texts and often abandon too long descriptions. You should add multiple photos to players, teams, matches, and venues setting the tone of your professional league in this way.

JoomSport hint: The optimal size of illustrative pictures should be between 200 and 800 px width that is enough for both great  picture quality and site performance. The consistency of photo dimensions within a gallery is also very important since different sizes and aspect ratios of photos make them looking sloppy and unattractive.

Now, when spring starts in the north and Australia meets autumn, comes a truly busy period for national sport leagues worldwide since many of them start their seasons in 2016. And, whatever is the tournament you’d like to start building online, you will likely find this task pretty embarrassing and awkward.

For example, the Australian Football League season, starting in March usually, consisted of 206 games in 2015, including 23 rounds and 18 final matches. Or, the 2015 Major League Soccer season took 340 matches to figure out the winner. So, it really doesn’t seem to be an easy walk to create manually that overwhelming number of matches, different match days, and seasons on you web site.

But, if you utilize the JoomSport extension you can take advantage of the JoomSport Match Generator add-on recently released and cataloged in our store.

The add-on allows streamlining the process above and enables you to generate matches in several clicks. This functionality saves tons of your time and keeps you from manual mistakes.

JoomSport Match Generator Features

• Generates matchdays and matches automatically;
• Supports Group, Knockout, and Double elimination matchday types;
• Fully integrated into JoomSport;
• Provides simple and intuitive configuration.

Future Development Roadmap

After collecting our first customers' reviews we decided to further enhance the product. First of all the improved sorting function will be added so it becomes easier to sort teams during the Matches generation process. Also, it is planned to develop the ability to generate matches of a selected Season Group only. The changes above will be delivered within the next JoomSport major release scheduled for the second quarter of 2016.

Add-on Installation

During the installation process you need to fulfill two actions. For a start, you should follow the BE -> Components -> JoomSport -> Add-ons path, choose the Match Generator add-on file and press the Install button.

Next, you need to publish the add-on to activate its functionality that completes the installation process.

BD: Hi, Roberto! Nice to see you. And, right of the bat, let’s start with your vision of the e-Sports industry and your company’s niche inside of it.

RL: Hi BearDev team, first of all let me thank you and your team for this opportunity. As you know, there have always been videogames tournaments among friends and, at a low scale, in specialized shops or in local associations. These events were clearly amateur-oriented, with the addition of some national or even international events, but the 90s are clearly a step forward for professional and competitive gaming.Over the last years, the e-Sports recognition increased a lot and this is mainly due to the industry created around it. Leagues and events organized by the Electronic Sports League (ESL) for example, or even by the developers of the most competitively successful games themselves, such as Riot (League of Legends), Blizzard Entertainment (Starcraft, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm), Valve (DotA and Counter Strike), or Activision (Call of Duty) take advantage of the media the same way as big regular sport events do.The key figure to understand the impact of e-Sports is 32 million viewers for the Finale of the League of Legends Season 3 World Championship in 2013, which was higher than the NBA play-offs of the same year.Regarding the Electronic Sports MastersTM (ESMTM), as you said, our objective is to promote e-Sports as well as the principles and values of the International e-Sports Federation (IeSF), but focusing on a single game, ARMA III.

BD: Is it true that e-Sports involve only a thin layer of the society mainly consisting of young people between 21 and 34 years old? And, what is your current audience structure?

RL: Having a look at the current evolution, I would even say younger, as kids now seem to be born with a tablet in their hands. Regarding Arma 3, it is a bit different because a big part of its community, players and ideas men are following the saga since its beginning in 2001 with the release of Operation Flashpoint… and it was 14 years ago. More recently, we decided to get figures about the average age among our audience, here are the results:

• 38.9% between 20 and 25;
• 22.2% older than 36;
• 16.7% between 26 and 30;
• 16.7%between 31 and 35;
• 5.6% younger than 20.

* Around 40% are players older than 31.

This shows that the ARMA III community is made of experienced players mainly due to the game developer company itself, Bohemia Interactive, which gave the code in open source as well as the tools allowing add-ons and mods to be created. About BI, I would like to add that their business model and the way they take care of the community are simply unique. Just have a look at the life duration of their games and free content they develop, such as e.g. the latest update “Nexus” released in November or the next one called “Eden” to be released at the beginning of 2016 with a powerful 3D edition tool, and as I said, everything is free!These are the things that make a player/customer faithful to the saga and create his special connection with the company.

BD: e-Sports seem to become a highly competitive market. How do you take the blow? What are the most important success components for you?