How to Integrate Your Sports Team’s Stats into BuddyPress

Knowing important details about your players comes with the territory of managing a sports team. And while you might be more interested in having an overview of a player’s performance rather than knowing their height and weight, your team’s fans are a different story.

As true and devoted fans, they crave every detail about their favorite player. Their interest includes not only statistical data such as the number of scores, offenses, and overall win ratio, but personal information as well. They want to know the height and the weight of their personal player, where they come from, which clubs they played for before, as well as what they like and dislike, their personal interests, and more.

It gives them something to talk about and discuss during the off-season, and it also gives your fans bragging rights as “the biggest fan” who knows everything under the sun about your team and the players.

Luckily, there is an easy way to satisfy your fans and give them what they want. If you’ve used WordPress for a while, you’ve probably heard of BuddyPress. It’s a plugin that allows you to display member profiles on your site where they can share personal details and chat with other members of your site.

But the good news about BuddyPress is that it can easily be integrated with SportsPress, allowing your players to share as much or as little personal information about themselves while displaying details about their performance.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the process of setting up BuddyPress, connecting it with SportsPress and sharing player profiles on your site.

Getting Started

The first thing you need to do is download BuddyPress from the official repository. Log in to your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New and search for BuddyPress. Then click on Install and Activate.

From there, you’re presented with the BuddyPress Welcome Screen, which includes links for setting up and managing your new community.

Before doing anything else, you’ll need to establish some BuddyPress settings. Click on the Get Started button to access BuddyPress settings.

BuddyPress will have some of the components pre-activated. If you want to allow your players to create groups, be able to send private messages to each other, and befriend each other, go ahead and select the checkbox next to the component you want to activate. When you’re done, click on Save Settings.

Next, you’ll need to configure the pages BuddyPress uses. Most of these are already created, except for the Registration and Activate pages. If you want your players to enter their own information, such as personal details, and interact with each other; you will need to enable user registration in Settings > General > Allow anyone to register for the site. Set the default role as Player for newly registered members and then click on Save Changes.

Head back to Settings > BuddyPress > Pages, ensure the Registration and Activation page are pointing to the correct pages and click on Save Changes.

The last step in this section is tweaking the BuddyPress options. Click on the Options tab to configure settings for your user profiles, groups, activity, and more.

Once you’re done making changes here, don’t forget to click Save Settings.

Once you’ve configured BuddyPress, it’s time to integrate it with SportsPress with a third-party extension, BuddyPress for SportsPress.

What is BuddyPress for SportsPress?

BuddyPress for SportsPress will allow you to connect your player profiles to registered users on your site and display them as a BuddyPress profile. Your players will then be able to have their stats displayed on their profile along with any personal information they wish to disclose.

Aside from catering to your team’s fans and giving them a glimpse into the person behind the player, it also helps you foster community and build team spirit. An added benefit of adding BuddyPress to your site is the ability to have team related discussions and keep track of them in one central place.

To begin, you will need to purchase the BuddyPress for SportsPress extension. It’s available for purchase from your account area where you can complete the purchase and get the license key.

After completing the purchase, download the extension and then go to your dashboard and upload the extension in Plugins > Add New > Upload plugin.

Once it’s uploaded, click on Activate. Enter your license details under SportsPress > Settings > Licenses tab and click on Save changes.

Now you’re ready to assign member profiles to your players.

Adding Team Stats and Player Information To BuddyPress

Before inviting players to register for your team website, let’s configure the available profile fields. First, make sure the Extended Profile component of BuddyPress is enabled by going to Settings > BuddyPress > Components. This will allow players to enter more information about themselves and have it displayed on their profile page.

Click on Users > Profile Fields. Right now, only the Name field is enabled and configured. However, the whole point of an online community is to make it more social so let’s do that.

Click on Add new field and enter the name for the field along with a brief description. Select the type of field from the drop-down menu:

If you want a short answer, select the text box. For longer answers such as their biography choose Multiline Text Area. You can also add a date field, allow them to enter a link to their favorite website, and more. Click on Save and your new field will be added. Continue doing this until you have all the fields you want. In our example, we’ve added fields for player’s birthday, likes, dislikes, and bio:

The next step is to tell your players to register for your site and fill out their profile. The Registration page will have the profile fields we added above, as seen in the screenshot below:

Once a player registers, you’ll have to assign them to the correct member profile. To do so, navigate to Players > All Players, and then click on the Edit link under the individual player you want to edit. Scroll down the page to the User box and select the appropriate user from the drop-down menu.

Click on Update Profile. Their new profile will display the information they entered during the signup process as well as their SportsPress stats.

Make Your Team Website More Social

As you can see, there are several benefits to making your site more social with BuddyPress. It can help you create a greater sense of community between players, allow you to have team discussions in one central place, and allow your fans to find out more about their favorite players.

Take advantage of these benefits by downloading BuddyPress for SportsPress extension along with our checklist of all the steps necessary to make your team website more social.

Image credits for the player and cover photo (CCO license): Soccer playerMountains

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