A New Era of ThemeBoy & SportsPress

We’re excited to announce that SportsPressPro.com has joined forces with Themeboy.com! With the merging of these two sites, ThemeBoy.com is ready to bringing more WordPress tools to help sports clubs continue to build incredible websites.

Along with this announcement of the new ThemeBoy website, it’s also the 1st anniversary of the SportsPress plugin. I’d like to share some of our memorable moments from leading up to launching our first plugin on WordPress.org and what we’ve learned as a WordPress business.

How It All Began

ThemeBoy.com was launched in 2011 where we sold just one sports theme, known as Football Club for WordPress. When we started, there were literally no sports club themes out there, which made Football Club the first of its kind.

Since then we’ve seen lots of sports themes come into the market, but we have been able to set ourselves apart by developing our own plugin and releasing it on WordPress.org last year. Honestly, it was scary. SportsPress was our first plugin and we were treading unfamiliar territory, but I’m really glad we took that leap of faith.

Today, it has become the #1 sports plugin on the WordPress repository and grown into an amazing project that anyone looking to use WordPress as a solution for their competitive sports team or club website has definitely heard of.

Other theme developers have begun to use our plugin to power their products as well (the power of open source!). It’s incredible to look back at all that has happened in just 12 months on WordPress.org.

Pro Version vs Extensions

Along with the free SportsPress plugin, we released a series of SportsPress extensions on themeboy.com and a Pro version of the plugin on sportspresspro.com.

Today, we’ve merged the two websites with the launch of our new themeboy.com website, and have decided to discontinue extensions and focus on a pro upgrade model. While the free + paid extensions model seems to be working for many other WordPress businesses, such as Easy Digital Downloads, WooThemes, and WP Ninjas, we believe that moving towards a simplified free and Pro version will keep us focused on developing a powerful plugin with premium functionality to support the needs of growing sports clubs.

As a result, we’ve decided to focus on the free + pro model by offering 4 different licenses of SportsPress Pro for users who are looking for advanced sports features on their websites. To show our appreciation for your continued support, all customers who have previously purchased SportsPress extensions will be grandfathered into this new model and receive a free license of SportsPress Pro.

Keeping Our Promises

Time sure does fly, we’re already half way through the year. To be completely honest, I can’t say I’ve been too great about keeping my personal new years resolutions. I can hardly remember what they were, and I’m not very proud to admit that… But I can say with confidence that we’ve been keeping up with what to expect from us in 2015!

The First Free SportsPress Theme on WordPress.org

In April 2015, our first free theme, Rookie, was approved for the WordPress theme directory. Before submitting Rookie to the directory, I heard rumors about themes taking much longer to get approved than plugins. I can vouch for that. From our experience, it took 4 months to get approved versus a couple days for the plugin. As you can imagine, after months of waiting, we were ecstatic when it finally got approved!

Rookie is a starter theme for anyone who wants to start creating a sports club website using the SportsPress plugin. In other words, anyone can now create a fully automated sports club management WordPress site for free. It has never been done before, and we think that’s pretty freaking awesome.

SportsPress Tutorial Videos

In addition to improving our documentation, we’ve released a series of tutorial videos where we walk you through how to get started with using SportsPress for your new website. You can find these tutorials within your dashboard, or by going to our YouTube channel.

More Themes & Plugins?

Yes, I can tell you that we do have more themes and plugins coming up this year! Now that we’ve launched, that’s the next thing you can expect from us.

Growth Over the Past Year: SportsPress Turns 1!

Since releasing version 1.0 on June 1st, 2014, SportsPress has had 43 minor and 8 majors releases.

Thanks to the new WordPress plugin stats interface introduced in February, we know that we have 6,000+ active users, and more than 60% of them are using the current version of our plugin.

It’s been great being able to see our user base grow and gaining this new insight into how active our users are with SportsPress. Thanks, WordPress!

To date, SportsPress has been downloaded over 66,000 times and has received over 120 reviews. Getting the support and feedback from our users has been the fuel to help us continue building this project, it really wouldn’t exist without you guys!

Here’s some of the great feedback we’ve received from our users:

Has SportsPress helped your sports club website? If you enjoy using the plugin, we would love for you to leave us a review on WordPress.org too!

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