2017 Year in Review

Hi guys! I hope you’re all enjoying the holiday festivities and are taking some time off to unwind and reflect on the past 12 months.

I think it’s important to take some time to recognize the things you’ve accomplished, reflect on the lessons learned, and set goals to smash out in the coming year ahead.

As 2017 comes to an end, the ThemeBoy team wanted to take a moment to look back at some of the milestones from the past 12 months, give our thanks, and tell you what to expect from us in 2018!

Looking back at 2017

• We introduced three new SportsPress integrations for WooCommerce, BuddyPress, and Yoast SEO.
• Paul and Jenni joined our growing team as the happiness manager and our WordPress savvy writer.
• We interviewed Josh Roos from Williamsburg International FC and asked him about how they started their club back in 2011.
• ThemeBoy partnered with WordPay to make it easy for teams to collect membership fees from their players.
• We started hosting weekly Slack meetings to talk all things #SportsPress
• We interviewed James Dunstan from UK-based American Football club Oxford Saints when he told us about how he successfully rebranded their club for a more professional and modern look.
• Brian and I attended WordCamp Tokyo and hung out with the lovely WordPress community in Japan.
• ThemeBoy sponsored WordCamp Manila and Paul gave a talk at the event!
• And last but not least… we launched our theme partnership program for theme developers who want to earn a bit more cash.

Changes introduced to SportsPress

• In SportsPress 2.2, Head to Head Tiebreakers was introduced so SportsPress can now easily analyze the events between two teams to determine who comes on top. Bulk actions to instantly create team calendars was also added in this update along with a couple other requested features from our ideaboard.
• In SportsPress 2.3, mode switching (player v player or team v team) per event, automatic user registrations, and player send offs features were introduced.
• In SportsPress 2.4, we introduced one of the biggest feature requests we’ve had to date; team and player registrations with payment processing.
• In SportsPress 2.5, we introduced a new Officials module along with a Player of the Match feature, a box score importer, and new performance icons.

Changes introduced to SportsPress Pro

• We introduced a new Timelines module to visually display what happened during an event.
• With the update introduced in 2.3, we introduced a new User Scores module to allow score submissions from registered users of your site.

A big thank you for an excellent year

Thank you to our customers and those who have contributed to make SportsPress what it has become over the past couple of years.

This year, we focused on building the SportsPress community to open our eyes and ears to how you are using the plugin, and also developing updates based on your ideas and feedback.

You guys are the ones that keep us going. That probably sounds a bit cheesy, but it’s true. When you work on digital products, often times your users come from all parts of the world and you don’t get a chance to meet them in person. Getting feedback and hearing from our users, really makes a difference in our day.

Here’s a totally awesome review that brightened our day. Shout out to Neilho!

If you want to get more involved with SportsPress, we encourage you guys to join us over on our Slack channel where was have weekly meetings to discuss the future of the plugin.

What to expect in 2018

In this coming year, we’ve got new developers who are coming on board to help us with performance improvements for SportsPress, develop more themes, and to deliver a high quality of support for our customers. We’re also looking for some awesome people to join our team, so if you think you’ve got what it takes, get in touch with us!

Are you a new SportsPress user or have you been using it for a while now? We’d love for you to tell us how can we help you in 2018!

We read every single response to this annual survey. It gives us an idea of what’s most important to you and where we should focus our energy in order to continue improving our products. So please, tell us what you think!

There are a whole lot of things we want to do in 2018 and beyond, but for now, we’re all taking a short and well deserved break.

We’ll see you in the new year!