New Theme: Football Club for SportsPress

On June 1st, we announced the launch of our new website introducing SportsPress as our free flagship league management sports plugin along with Premier, the first ever SportsPress compatible WordPress theme. Since this initial launch, a number of new Football Club users have been wanting to use the theme in conjunction with the SportsPress plugin. You’ve been heard and we’re excited to announce the release of our 2nd SportsPress compatible theme, Football Club for SportsPress!

Football Club for SportsPress is not an update to the previous Football Club for WordPress theme, it is an entirely new product that has been developed to work with SportsPress. While the design is almost identical to the original Football Club theme, Football Club for WordPress is not compatible with SportsPress and will remain an all-in-one stand alone club management theme. That said, we’ve made the decision to give users who purchased Football Club for WordPress on or after June 1st a free download of Football Club for SportsPress.

An important thing to note is that because Football Club for WordPress runs on an entirely different system, switching over to Football Club for SportsPress won’t be as easy as activating another SportsPress compatible theme (Example: Premier). Here are the Pros vs. Cons of switching to Football Club for SportsPress from the original Football Club theme:

PROS

  • You’ll be able to use SportsPress, the most popular sports plugin on the WordPress repository. All of our future products (themes, plugins, and extensions) will be a part of this eco-system. You can read more about this here.
  • SportsPress is extendable, which means you can use SportsPress Extensions to add specific features to your sports website as you need them.
  • You can also use SportsPress Pro, a premium version of the SportsPress plugin, that will give you a series of sports features. SportsPress Pro has been developed for serious teams, clubs, and athletes looking for extra functionality not found in the free version.
  • More sports compatibility. Using SportsPress means you will instantly have access to several different sports presets included with the plugin. You can also tweak, modify, and even create your own equations to manage your statistics.
  • More language translations. SportsPress is currently the most active WordPress project on Transifex and has been translated in over 50 languages. If you’re interested in contributing to this open-source project, you’re more than welcome to join our wonderful translation team!
  • Switching to a SportsPress compatible theme means that you will easily be able to change your theme in the future without worrying about losing any of your data or starting from scratch.

CONS

  • Football Club for WordPress was developed 3 years before we developed SportsPress. Because of this, switching over won’t be as easy as activating a SportsPress compatible theme. You can bring over basic data (players, events, teams, etc) using the import tools but you will need to manually add your featured images, player and staff photos, team logos, statistics, etc.
  • SportsPress core does not include Sponsors. Football Club customers who purchased the theme before June 1st, received this extension for free. However, if you’ve purchased Football Club for WordPress on or after June 1st, and you want the sponsors feature, you have the option to continue to use the old theme or you will need to buy the Sponsors extension.

Making the decision to stick with Football Club for WordPress or switching to Football Club for SportsPress is entirely up to you. They are both great themes in their own right. As you will see in the images comparing the two themes below, the design is very similar. The main difference is in the backend management of your website and that SportsPress is an extendable plugin.

SportsPress has quickly become the most popular sports plugin on the WordPress repository and continues to grow with each update. SportsPress version 1.3 is a major update to the plugin with many new features that I’ll explain in a follow-up post. If you haven’t already, download the latest version of the plugin.

While Football Club for SportsPress shares the same design as the original Football Club, the new theme uses the SportsPress plugin for its league management capabilities that were not included in the older version.

You can now purchase the Football Club for SportsPress theme directly from themeboy.com. Once you’ve become a ThemeBoy customer, you will receive a license where you will receive 1 year of free updates and support.

Along with the release of this new Football Club theme and the big update to SportsPress, we are also announcing the release of Premier version 1.0.6.

This means that all of our products are now fully SportsPress plugin compatible and can be used with the latest version of WordPress.

Stay in the loop

Enjoy this article? Get more content like this directly in your inbox.

Take your club to the next level

Already have a theme? SportsPress Pro adds advanced sports features to any WordPress site, and works perfectly together with any of our themes.