Football Pool

This plugin adds a fantasy sports pool to your blog. Visitors of your website can predict outcomes of matches and earn extra points with bonus questions. Every player can view scores and charts of the other pool contenders.

This plugin installs some custom tables in the database and ships with match information for the FIFA 2022 World Cup, but it can be easily populated with the match info for other championships or sports. Please note that deactivating this plugin may also delete all the plugin’s data from the database, so please make sure the ‘keep data on uninstall’ option on the settings page is enabled if you don’t want to loose your data (it is enabled by default since version 2.3.1).

I originally coded this pool in PHP as a standalone website for the UEFA 2000 championship and rewrote the damn thing several times for every European Championship and World Cup since. Every year I added new features. In 2012 I decided to rewrite it as a WordPress plugin and uploaded it to the plugin directory. I hope you like it.

A special thank you to all the users of the plugin that donated some money! And also to the translators that found time to translate the many labels in this plugin. And thanks to all the users that reported bugs and helped improving the plugin.

Features

• Users can predict match outcomes.
• Automatic calculation of the pool ranking. Or define your own custom ranking for a group of matches.
• You can add bonus questions for extra fun (single answer and multiple choice).
• Add your own teams and match info to use the plugin for another (national) competition.
• Import or export the game schedule.
• Automatic calculation of championship standing.
• Configurable scoring options.
• Use the built in pages and/or shortcodes to add the pool to your blog.
• Use different leagues for your users (optional).
• Users have charts where their scores are plotted over time. And they can compare themselves to other players. (Only available if Highcharts chart API is downloaded separately, see Help for details).
• Several widgets and shortcodes to display info from the championship or the pool.
• Extra info pages for venues and teams.
• Add your own functionality via filters and actions (see help page in the admin or this post in the forum for some examples).
• WP-CLI support for calculating the user ranking (much faster than a calculation via the admin).
• WP-CLI support for importing match results via a csv file.

Documentation
The plugin has a help file in the admin that contains a lot of information. But if you like a step by step tutorial, I can recommend the following: Janek from WP Simple Hacks website made a very nice guide about my plugin. It even has a video where he explains how to set up the plugin.

Other things

• This plugin requires WordPress 4.8 or higher, PHP 7.4 or higher and jQuery 1.4.3 or higher.
• If you want to use the charts feature, please download the Highcharts API (see “Installation” or the plugin’s Help page in the WordPress admin for details).

If you find bugs, please contact me via the support forum. If you like the plugin, please rate it on the plugin page on WordPress.org.

Localizations

If someone wants to help translate the plugin in another language, or help keeping the existing translations up-to-date, please visit the plugin’s page on translate.wordpress.org. Please read the information on the website carefully if you want your translation work to be reviewed and approved: After your contribution.

A big shout-out to all the translation contributors and editors that helped translating the plugin so far. Thank you!

The FAQ contains information on how to use a custom translation. I will keep including the pot language file in the plugin as a starting point for custom translations.

Shortcodes

The plugin has the following shortcodes. See help page in the admin for extra info.

• fp-predictions
• fp-predictionform
• fp-matches
• fp-match-scores
• fp-question-scores
• fp-next-matches
• fp-last-matches
• fp-user-score
• fp-user-ranking
• fp-ranking
• fp-countdown
• fp-group
• fp-link
• fp-register
• fp-totopoints
• fp-fullpoints
• fp-goalpoints
• fp-diffpoints
• fp-jokermultiplier
• fp-plugin-option
• fp-league-info
• fp-chart-settings/fp-stats-settings
• fp-user-list
• fp-money-in-the-pot
• fp-last-calc-date
• fp-next-match-form

Incompatible plugins & themes

The following plugins have been reported as not compatible with the Football Pool plugin. If you have a solution and/or are the author of the plugin you can contact me on wordpressfootballpool [at] gmail [dot] com. If you’re having problems with another plugin that is not in the list, please let me know.

Basically, every caching solution should be tested with care.

• DB Cache Reloaded Fix (v2.3)
• Cimy User Extra Fields (v2.6.1) when using the email confirmation option
• Easy Timer (for football pool version 2.3.8 and below)
• Theme Gadgetry (ThemeFuse framework)
• memcached

Some themes prevent the plugin from displaying its content. See this post on the forum for a tip on how to resolve this.