Installing & initial Configuration

[Bob]

INSTALL STEPS

See the XF2 Manual for addon install instructions (they are standardized for all XF2 addons)

CONFIGURATION

One of the first things you should do is make sure that all the Administrators have ADMIN Privs to use all the Administrative functions. Groups & permissions >> Administrators >> click on the individual admin and make sure to check "Manage Pickem"

Next thing to do is to set the Picks Layout Type Format: Options >> Pickem >> Picks Layout Format >> Choose between AWAY @ HOME or HOME vs AWAY. This will apply globally for ALL pools.

Initial Configuration takes awhile as there are A LOT of things you need to add based on the SPORT Types that you wish to use.

A Pool is associated with a Season within a Sport, so you need to configure a SPORT with at least 1 Season with at least 1 Week, with at least 1 Game before you can create your first Pool.

• Create Sport (if doesn't already exist)
  • Create Teams for Sport
  • Create Season(s) for Sport
    • Create Week(s) for Season
      • Create Games for Week
• Create Pool (associate with a specific Season of a Sport).

Create Sport
First thing you want to do is create a SPORT. Click on Admin CP >> Pickem >> Sport Management. Simply click on [Add sport] button (takes a couple seconds to add a new sport type.

Create Teams for Sport
Your Sport needs TEAMS... so click on "Teams" link ... Initially, there will be no teams, so you need to create them. Very simple process. Click on [Add Team], fill in the info, hit save.

Create Season for Sport
Your Sport needs SEASONS... so click on "Seasons" link ... Initially, there will be no seasons, so you need to create them. Very simple process. Click on [Add Season], fill in the info, hit save.

Create Weeks for Season
Next Step.. need to add some WEEKS to your new Season.

Click on "Weeks" (similar to Teams in the Sports Management).. [Add week].

Now, this is where you need to pay attention to what I have to say.

Week Names SHOULD be numeric ie 1 however, you CAN use names like Wild Card Weekend.

Using Names vs Numbers WILL mess with formatting in certain places (still working on a decent solution).. its best to just go with the usual number format.

DO NOT put the word WEEK in there.. just the NUMBER!

Start Date. This is the date the week becomes the default week for initial page viewing. Its best to have the start date at least 24 hours after the last games for the previous week.

Alert Date. This should be self explanatory, its the date that you want alert reminders sent out. A 2nd reminder will automatically be sent out 24-48 hours after the first reminder is sent out.

Lock Date. This is used to CLOSE the week (stop people from editing their picks for that week). Its best to set the Lock date when the first game for that particular week starts.

Last thing you do is to select the Time Zone for the dates (should be the standard time zone for the sport).. ie for NFL Games, the Standard time Zone used is Eastern Time. SO if the Patriots and Raiders game starts at 13:00 Eastern and you are in Mountain Timezone, the system will display 11:00 AM (as it should). Rinse and repeat for all weeks in a season (HINT: you don't need to add the ALL right away). Once you have a week added, the next step is adding Games.

Create Games for Week
Adding Games: To add games to a particular week, click on "Games" for that specific week. Click [Add game]. Select the Visitor and Home teams and click save. Rinse and Repeat to create all games for that particular week.

You can also bulk add games by clicking on the [Add games] button (is a bit quicker than adding them 1 by 1).

Create Pool
Now that Sports are done, its time to create your first POOL Admin CP >> Pickem >> Pool Management [Add pool]. Choose the SPORT and the Pool Type (Normal, Spread, Draw or Survivor). This will take you to a form appropriate for the Sport/Type of pool.

Give your pool a title, ie 2012 NFL Regular Season (Do not include the word POOL as the last word as that is auto appended in various places through out the addon). Choose a Season (this is what associates the Pool with the correct weeks/games). Next set the pool join permissions, and other misc settings for the pool (most of those can be edited, however, the season can not as that is locked in once you hit save).

At this point, you should have a minimum config complete Week 1 for your first Pool that is usable for your members

Scoring
Once a game has been completed, you simply EDIT the game (click on the Game Title) and enter the score for each team. NOTE: You will notice that the default scores are -1 and -1 ... this is so that the system knows that the game has not been played yet as well as being able to enter a 0 to 0 tie (for DRAW pools).

Thats about it. Its pretty basic at this stage. More features will be added as time goes on.

 

[Bob]

IMPORTANT NOTE: The screenshots are from the XF1 version of Pickem (Pickem 1.x). The XF2 version of Pickem (Pickem 2.x) has a similar flow to the administration, however, the layouts for XF2 are much different than XF1 (I'll update this with new screen shots when time permits).

As mentioned above, before creating a Pool, you need to configure your Sport (Teams, Seasons, Weeks, Games) via Sport Management area.

In Sport Management, you need to create a Season, then add Weeks to that Season, Then add Games to each Week. Once that is done, THEN you create a pool and associate the Pool with a Season. The "WEEKS" part of the Pool is purely for setting the Winners (1st, 2nd, 3rd place) for Each Week.

Click on Sport Management. Each Sport has links to TEAM MANAGEMENT (Teams: # and SEASON MANAGEMENT (Seasons: #) Click on Seasons 0 to access the Season for the Sport you just created.




On the Season Management, Click on Create Season..


The Sport should already be pre selected, give it a season name eg. 2015 NFL Regular Season



This is just a shot of the Season Edit form.



Click on the Weeks: 0 link on the Season listing to access the WEEKS management for that particular Season. Click on "Create Week".



Fill in the Form and hit save week. For the first week of the season, you want to make sure the start date is at least NOW or older or the frontend will not display until the Week Start date hits. Week Stop date should match the start time of the last game of the week.




Once you have Week 1 added, you can create some Games for the week. Click on Games: 0 to access Game Management. Click on Create Game (NOTE: Create games is NEW in the next versions, so ignore that button in this screen shot).


Enter the Game Data and hit save. The Game lock date is used so that you can lock EARLY games (like Thursday night games) and still let users set sat, sun, mon games etc.





When first setting up, its a good idea to create a Dummy Season with just 1 week and a few games. That way you can kinds get a feel for it. And please ask questions if you have them. There are all sorts of ways to run leagues, set dates/times etc. You don't have to add an entire season at once either. I usually create 4 weeks in advance and then each week when I do scoring on Sunday night, I quickly knock out another week. Makes it much less time consuming lol

 

[MMAcomm]

Click on Sport Management. Each Sport has links to TEAM MANAGEMENT (Teams: # and SEASON MANAGEMENT (Seasons: #) Click on Seasons 0 to access the Season for the Sport you just created.

In the case of LPGA or Tennis, for instance, how do you recommend managing these individual athlete sports optimally?

Each person is a "team", but what do you put for the team abbreviation? The person's initials?

 

[Bob]

I really can't recommend using it with individual sports as its designed for TEAM vs TEAM on a weekly basis type sport (like NFL, Soccer etc). For Team Sports that aren't on a one game per week type schedule, you still need to do it week to week. What you do is pick specific games for that week (like the top 10 games of the week) and let members pick those. Seems to work fairly OK for MLB, Hockey, NBA, NCAAB etc. For non team sports, its still only going to work when its player vs player (like Tennis). Golf won't work (well, unless its like the Ryder cup were its US vs UK). I personally only do Playoffs for sports like NBA, MLB, Hockey and have never tried to use if for anything else.

As for the abbreviation, IIRC, its limited to 5 characters, so the persons initials would be the best to try.

Let me know how it goes. I am curious on how you plan to use this

 

[BIGLLC]

Can you explain the pool types? Is there a description anywhere?

Chose a Pool Type (Normal, Spread or Draw)

 

[Bob]

Can you explain the pool types? Is there a description anywhere?

Chose a Pool Type (Normal, Spread or Draw)

Normal = Standard Pickem, which is picking either the home team to win or the away team to win.

Spread = It is standard pickem, however, the SPREAD comes into play, so Team X might beat Team Y straight up, however, Team Y might win in spread pickem, because they covered the Spread.

Draw = This is for leagues like Soccer, that want to offer a 3rd option when making picks. This option lets members pick home team, visitor team or DRAW (TIE).

 

[EasyEazy]

Bob

Sorry to jump on this thread but id like your opinion. I run pickems for the English Premier League. Each season they have three new teams so im undecided which way to go now. Should I:

Create a new sport and add all the premier league teams again.

Or

Edit last season sport and chnage the three relegated teams to the three new ones.

You run a NFL but im not sure if they do promotion/relegation in that. What would you do?

 

[Bob]

If you Delete a TEAM, its going to delete every game that team was associated with in the system. This means its going to effect PREVIOUS seasons which you can view.

The BEST thing to do is just leave those teams in the system and add the new teams each year. The post a suggestion to add an option to the TEAM management to be able to mark a team as current or historical so that only current teams will be fetched in various places (like on team chooser dropdowns in the admin CP or like in Survivor, they won't be displayed in the list of available teams).

 

[EasyEazy]

If you Delete a TEAM, its going to delete every game that team was associated with in the system. This means its going to effect PREVIOUS seasons which you can view.

The BEST thing to do is just leave those teams in the system and add the new teams each year. The post a suggestion to add an option to the TEAM management to be able to mark a team as current or historical so that only current teams will be fetched in various places (like on team chooser dropdowns in the admin CP or like in Survivor, they won't be displayed in the list of available teams).

Yeah I kinda thought that would be the answer but just wanted to check. At the moment its only 3 extra teams so ill just add those in. Ill add that as a suggestion now.

 

[ZackM]

Is there a way to reuse teams from one sport in another sport? Such as using the teams setup for college football and quickly adding them to the college basketball group?

 

[Bob]

Is there a way to reuse teams from one sport in another sport?

No, a team has a ONE to ONE relationship (a database schema term) with a sport, they can't be a ONE to MANY relationship.

 

[BGObsession]

On the Week's 'stop' settings, you seem to give conflicting instructions? In one place you suggest using the start time of the FIRST game of that week... in another place you suggest using the start time of the LAST game of that week. It sounds like, whatever date/time is set as the 'stop', no picks or changes can be made. So if we set it using the start time of the first game, that means if they don't get all picks in prior to the very first game, they are locked out. If we use the start of the last game, wouldn't that mean they could theoretically go in and change the picks for earlier games after they know the result?

I am thinking we should use the start time of the very FIRST game as the 'stop' setting and that the other entry was just a mistake? Can you verify?

 

[Bob]

Its FLEXIBLE to cover SEVERAL different types of sports and ways to play the game.

Some people like to lock ALL GAMES at the same time (usually before the start of the first game of the week. Others (like me), like to lock each game right before kickoff of each game. its your choice to do what ever you prefer.

The START DATE of week 1 for the 2020 season can be NOW.

The START DATE for week 2, should be at least 24 hours after the LAST GAME OF WEEK 1 (this is to allow time for scoring of week 1 and for participants to see week 1 pre loaded to see their scores without having to navigate back to week 1).

For NFL, there is a game MONDAY NIGHT, so what I suggestion is the week start date be WED (which gives at least a full 24 hours after the monday night game).

The STOP date LOCKS THE ENTIRE WEEK (locks all games so no picks can be made), so it should be set to the kickoff of the LAST GAME OF THE WEEK.

As a TIP for adding games, I mention that a trick you can so is set the week lock date to when a majority of the games start for that week, so that the game lock date is PRESET (making it faster to bulk add games). After adding the games for that week, you edit the week and set the Week Lock date to the start time of the last game for that week.

Don't OVER complicate things. Its SIMPLE... the start time for the week is only used for decided which week is loaded by default when first accessing Pickem (so if the current week is week 1, when first loading pickem, its knows to show you week 1 instead of week 2). The Week LOCK date is for locking the entire week (meaning no picks can be made once the week locks). Each game also has a game LOCK date (so that individual games can be locked before the week lock date/time.

 

[BGObsession]

Thanks Bob - that is very helpful!

 

[David Denton]

We just installed it today with no major issues that I can see except we needed to improvise a workaround to display the logos. That is an issue on our end as we don't have the ability to upload files outside of add on provided functionality.

You need server access for that, which we don't have.

Feel free to join our board and poke around

Pickem

 

[Bob]

We just installed it today with no major issues that I can see except we needed to improvise a workaround to display the logos. That is an issue on our end as we don't have the ability to upload files outside of add on provided functionality.

You need server access for that, which we don't have.

Feel free to join our board and poke around

Pickem

The latest supported version of Pickem (Pickem 2.2.3) was a special release specifically for implementing Asset Uploader for Team Icons and Sport Icons, which was necessary for XF Cloud customers, as they do not have FTP access.

There is a sticky announcement about this as well as implemented threads that explains this in the Pickem Support Forms (Implemented - Team Logo: Asset Uploader and Implemented - Sport Logo: Asset Uploader).

The email blast, linked to these as well.

 

[TerryP]

The latest supported version of Pickem (Pickem 2.2.3) was a special release specifically for implementing Asset Uploader for Team Icons and Sport Icons, which was necessary for XF Cloud customers, as they do not have FTP access.

There is a sticky announcement about this as well as implemented threads that explains this in the Pickem Support Forms (Implemented - Team Logo: Asset Uploader and Implemented - Sport Logo: Asset Uploader).

The email blast, linked to these as well.

Damn good job on this one, Bob. It's so easy to add a few teams each season (college football site.)