Admin

  • 12 Mar 2022

Weekly checklist

  1. Add new players to the members database (if any new players are debuting this week) – Fred / Max G
  2. Add those new players to the Fantasy league – Fred / Max G
  3. Add fixtures for the weekend as required – ???
    • League fixtures will already exist
    • Most friendly fixtures will need to be created, but it’s only important to do this before the weekend if you plan to score the game electronically
  4. Select teams for the fixtures – ???
  5. For home league games, enter the basic match result information by midnight of the match – match captain / vice captain
    • This will happen automatically if the match was scored on the app and submitted properly.
  6. Enter the full match scorecards – Iskandar / Max W
  7. Add the links to the match scorecards on the Fixtures page of the website – Fred
  8. Publish the match reports and link to the Fixtures page of the website – Matt S

Play-Cricket

Intro

  • Play-Cricket (PC) is the ECB’s central service for tracking players, matches, scorecards, stats etc. for clubs across the country.
  • We have a PC sub-site at https://ploughmans.play-cricket.com/ – all tasks listed below start at this site.

Accounts & admin roles

  • All players at the club are registered as members in the Plough members database on Play-Cricket.
  • Most players are just “temporary members” that are set up by one of our admins and do not have a Play-Cricket login. They are registered just so they can be included in fixtures / scorecards.
  • A number of players have real accounts (with a Play-Cricket login) and have been assigned one of the following admin roles:
    • Main Site Administrator – access to everything on the Plough PC subsite. There are only a handful of these.
    • Weekly Tasks – custom role for others who need to create players, fixtures and enter match scores.

Creating a full Play-Cricket account for a member

  1. Edit the player’s details by adding their email address.
  2. Play-Cricket will email them asking them to complete their registration.
  3. Once the player has followed the steps in the email, find the player again in the members database. They should no longer be a “Temp” member. Click the Edit Roles icon.
  4. Under Administrator Role, pick the appropriate role for this player from the list above and hit Save.
  5. The player will receive another email asking them to accept the Terms and Conditions of being an admin.
  6. Once the player has followed these steps, find the player again in the members database and check that they have the role they’ve been given.

Login & site administration

  1. Go to https://ploughmans.play-cricket.com/ and click Sign In in the top right corner (desktop) / open the site menu and tap Sign In (mobile)
  2. Enter your login details on the sign in page.
  3. Annoyingly the sign in process often takes you to https://www.play-cricket.com/ (the main ECB Play-Cricket site), so you will need to go back to https://ploughmans.play-cricket.com/ to access our site admin area.
  4. To access the Plough administration section on desktop, click on the person icon in the top right corner and select Site Administration:


    On mobile, open the menu then expand your name, then tap Site Administration:
  5. Once you’re in Site Admin, you can do things like add players, fixtures and match results. On desktop, this is all available under the “Day-to-Day” section on the left hand side:



    On mobile, click the admin submenu in the top left corner (next to the Ploughmans CC heading) and expand the Day-to-Day section:

Players

Adding a player

  1. Login to the Plough Play-Cricket site and go to Site Adminstration.
  2. On the Day-to-Day admin menu, select Members and then Members Database.
  3. If you’re unsure if a player already exists, use the Search For box to check their surname.
  4. If the player needs to be added, click Add Member.
  5. Play-Cricket will ask you to try to find the player from their previous club – don’t bother with this. Inevitably it requires you to ask that club for permission to take over the player’s record. No club has ever responded when I’ve tried this.
  6. Instead, click New Member.
  7. Enter First Name and Surname and hit Save. This will create the basic player record and take you to the Roles page for the player.
  8. Select Squad Players from the left hand side (desktop) / from the dropdown menu (mobile).
  9. Set the Status to Active for all roles (1st XI, 2nd XI, Friendly XI) and hit Save – this means they will appear for selection for a fixture no matter which Plough team is playing.
  10. To access their Play-Cricket ID (e.g. for adding to the Plough fantasy cricket league:
    1. Select Members Database again from the Day-to-Day admin menu
    2. Enter the new player’s surname in the search box.
    3. Copy the ID field from the search results.

Editing a player

You may need to edit a player’s details, most commonly if their name has been spelled incorrectly when first entered.

  1. Login to the Plough Play-Cricket site and go to Site Adminstration.
  2. On the Day-to-Day admin menu, select Members and then Members Database.
  3. Enter the player’s surname in the Search For box and click the View button on the player in the search results.
  4. Edit the relevant details and hit Save.
    1. If some details are greyed out, the player has a full Play-Cricket account and only they can edit the details themselves by logging in.
    2. If you are changing the name, make sure the Display Name section isn’t populated. Anything in the Display Name field will override the player’s real name when shown on a scorecard.
  5. If the name has been edited, find a game that the player has played and edit our scorecard. You only need to reselect the player’s name in their batting position, then hit Save. This will force Play Cricket to recognise the name change and update scorecards where the player has played. Eventually the change will filter through to our stats data as well.

Deleting a player

Generally speaking we don’t delete players because it will also remove all of their stats and leave gaps in scorecards we’ve already filled out.

Fixtures

  • Each fixture needs to be created on Play-Cricket so you can score the game electronically and/or enter the match results and scorecard.
  • All league fixtures are already created at the start of the season so no action is required by us for those matches.
  • Some well-organised friendly opposition will have created our fixtures at the start of the season, but typically we need to create them as the season progresses.
  • Typically we would create the fixtures for each weekend mid-week but this is only really important if you plan to score electronically on the app. Otherwise it’s fine to add a fixture after the match is complete so that you can then enter in the scorecard for stats purposes.
  • Annoyingly, recently created fixtures don’t tend to appear on the scoring app until a day or so after their creation. If you plan to score a friendly match on the app, make sure you create the fixture well in advance!

Adding a fixture

  1. Login to the Plough Play-Cricket site and go to Site Adminstration.
  2. On the Day-to-Day admin menu, select Fixtures and then Fixture Management.
  3. Check if the fixture has already been created by someone else. By default it will only list fixtures in the next week but you can change this with the filter options at the top.
  4. To create the fixture, click Add Fixtures.
  5. Set the fixture details as below:
    • Scoring rule – ECB Generic 40 overs per side
    • Team – pick the Plough team that will be playing (typically Friendly XI as the 1st / 2nd XI fixtures are mostly done by the league)
    • Date
    • Start time
    • Home/Away
    • Fixture Type – Friendly
    • Opposition
      • Click Find
      • Enter the club name to search for it. This will bring up clubs all over the UK so make sure you pick the right one based on location. Clarify with the fixtures secretary if needed.
      • Select the correct team that we’ll be playing (1st XI, 2nd XI, Sunday XI etc). This can be tricky for clubs with many teams. Clarify with the fixtures secretary if needed.
      • If you’ve searched and the club doesn’t exist on Play-Cricket (this happens sometimes for friendlies), you can ask the oppo to register themselves. If this doesn’t work, instead you can click Add Scratch Team and enter the oppo name. No stats will be recorded for the oppo in this case but that’s ok. FYI you can’t score a match against a scratch team on the app.
    • Home team ground – if it’s our home game, select DSG from the ground list.
  6. Click Save

Selecting the team for a fixture

Selecting the Plough team for a fixture is not mandatory but saves time on game day if you are scoring on the app (the Plough XI will already be selected in the app). We tend to do it for league matches as they are most commonly scored electronically.

  1. Login to the Plough Play-Cricket site and go to Site Adminstration.
  2. On the Day-to-Day admin menu, select Fixtures and then Fixture Management.
  3. Locate the fixture of interest and click the Team icon:
  4. Locate each selected player in the player list and add them to the team.
  5. Select the captain and wicketkeeper.
  6. Click Save in the top right corner.

Editing a fixture

  1. Login to the Plough Play-Cricket site and go to Site Adminstration.
  2. On the Day-to-Day admin menu, select Fixtures and then Fixture Management.
  3. Locate the fixture of interest and click the Edit icon.
  4. Change the details as necessary and hit Save.

Deleting a fixture

  1. Login to the Plough Play-Cricket site and go to Site Adminstration.
  2. On the Day-to-Day admin menu, select Fixtures and then Fixture Management.
  3. Locate the fixture of interest and tick the checkbox at the end of the row.
  4. Hit the Delete button.

Results

Basic result information

This covers the basic result data – who won, toss result, runs / wickets / overs for each side. It all appears on the first screen of a fixture’s results entry.

  1. Login to the Plough Play-Cricket site and go to Site Adminstration.
  2. On the Day-to-Day admin menu, select Results.
  3. Locate the fixture of interest (you may need to adjust the search filters) and click the Edit Result icon.
  4. Fill out all information on the first screen and hit Save:
  5. If you want double check the result has been recorded, go to https://ploughmans.play-cricket.com/ (not the Site Admin section), and from the menu click Matches and then Fixtures & Results. You should see the result appear in this list. It’s always worth doing this for league matches to make sure we don’t get penalty points!

Full scorecard entry

Filling out the full scorecard for the match follows on from the basic result information. Note that most of this work will be done for you if the match was scored electronically, and instead you’ll just need to check and fix any incorrect / missing data.

  1. Enter the basic result information for the match, or if it has already been entered then return to the basic results screen. Proceed to the next screen in the process by either hitting Save or clicking on the first “Confirm Team” item in the menu on the left hand side.
  2. Enter the Plough team and hit Save
    • This may have already been done earlier in the week, particularly for league games.
    • Putting the players in batting order here makes it much easier to enter the batting scorecard later.
    • For stats purposes, make sure you pick the captain and wicketkeeper correctly. If more than one player kept (common in friendlies), you can only select one. Check if one of the keepers had any dismissals and pick them.
    • If you can’t find a player in the full player list, it’s likely they haven’t been added to the members database yet. Add them and then come back to this screen.

  3. Enter the oppo team and hit Save
    • Finding oppo players in the list can be quite difficult:
      • You may need to adjust the “Show Squad” dropdown to show All Players (or even Everyone), as many oppo players are not properly associated with 1st XI, 2nd XI etc. squads.
      • Players are often missing entirely, in which case you need to enter them as Unsure (see button at the bottom of the player list). Also see further note below re friendly games where most players are missing.
      • Teams often have many players with the same or similar names and don’t make it clear on the paper scorecard which player it is. If you can’t figure it out, just pick one and the oppo can fix it.
    • You must pick a captain and wicketkeeper even if you don’t know which players they were. I often just pick the first player as both roles if I’m not sure.
    • For league games:
      • Ultimately it is the oppo’s responsibility to make sure their team is correct, but we try to put the list in ourselves as much as possible so it’s easier to enter the scorecard.
    • For friendly games:
      • If it looks like most of the oppo players are in the list, I tend to add them to make entering the scorecard easier (and help out the oppo).
      • However, often for friendlies the oppo will have very few players added to Play-Cricket. If the majority are not there, I tend to just leave the whole team blank (and then entering Unsure everywhere later in the scorecard entry).

  4. Enter the Plough batting scorecard
    • Plough batting record
      • Make sure the batting order is correct by adjusting the batsman names so they appear in the right order (don’t change the numbers in on the left hand side – this just makes the card very confusing).
      • For each batsman, enter all data including 4s, 6s and balls. This typically involves going through the paper scorecard and counting boundaries and balls (the scorer on the day is unlikely to do this for you!)
      • If balls haven’t been recorded for our innings, work out the overall team strike rate and apply this to each batsman (i.e. calculate a number of balls faced so that each batsman has the same strike rate). If you leave the balls blank, for stats the innings counts as X runs off 0 balls, which can massively skew season and career strike rates.
      • If you are unsure about the oppo fielder and/or bowler involved in a dismissal (or you left the oppo team blank in Step 3), make sure you select “Unsure” from the dropdown instead of leaving it blank. If you leave it blank, this can mess up the stats. In league matches, it will be the oppo’s responsibility to fix this up.
    • Extras
      • Do your best to fill out the extras, but for friendlies in particular it can be hard to read on the scorecard and may not match up to what appears in the bowling.
    • Fall of wickets
      • League
        • This section must be filled out in full.
      • Friendlies
        • Fill out the fall of wicket data as best as you can – often this is recorded poorly on the paper scorecard, especially for friendlies.
        • The most important parts are the score and the batsman out / not out. The not out batter score is nice to have but not essential (for friendlies) because it doesn’t affect the partnership data.

    • Oppo bowling figures
      • League games
        • As the batting side, we are responsible for putting in Overs, Maidens, Runs and Wickets for the oppo bowlers. Don’t bother with wides and no balls.
        • If you are unsure about a bowler’s name, select Unsure and it is the responsiblity of the oppo to fix this up.
      • Friendlies
        • Generally we put in the Overs, Maidens, Runs and Wickets for the oppo as best we can. Don’t bother with wides and no balls.
        • If you left the oppo team blank in Step 3, just leave the bowling figures blank.
  5. Enter the oppo batting scorecard
    • Oppo batting record
      • For each batsman, just enter the runs scored. Don’t bother with 4s, 6s or balls.
      • Make sure mode of dismissal, fielder and/or bowler is filled out accurately for every batsman. Most commonly the fielder responsible for a catch or run out will be missing from the paper scorecard – ask on the club chat for the players from that team to clarify.
      • If you don’t know a batsman’s name, make sure you select Unsure from the dropdown instead of leaving it blank. Leaving it blank will mess up the stats.
    • Extras
      • Do your best to fill out the extras, but for friendlies in particular it can be hard to read on the scorecard. However, we do at least try to make the counts match what is in our bowling figures.
    • Fall of wicket
      • Try to fill this out but ultimately it doesn’t matter as much because it’s the oppo’s scorecard. This is frequently missing or poorly populated on the paper scorecard.
      • In league games, we try to fill it out as best we can but ultimately it’s the oppo’s responsibility to make sure it’s correct.
    • Plough bowling figures
      • Fill out all columns, including Wides and No balls. Typically you’ll need to count the wides and no balls yourself from the recorded overs – the scorer on the day is unlikely to do this for you.
      • In league games, the figures are actually the responsibility of the batting side (the oppo) but we want them to be as accurate as possible for stats so we tend to enter them in full.

  6. Double check for any missing data
    • When you hit Save on the final scorecard, Play-Cricket will take you to a result summary page.
    • Look through each innings and look for bits highlighted in red that may need to be fixed up (unless you’ve decided not to fix them based on the advice above).

What if it doesn’t add up?

  • Almost every week there will be at least one scorecard where things don’t add up properly, mainly in friendlies. It’s quite hard to fix after the game is done (it really needs to be tracked and fixed while the scoring is happening, or at least at the end of the innings on the day).
  • Play-Cricket will tell you that something doesn’t add up when you hit Save:
  • To try to fix:
    • First try recounting the bowling figures, as this is the most common place something goes wrong.
    • Second try recounting all the batsmans’ scores.
    • You may need to adjust a batsman’s score, a bowler’s figures or the overall extras to try to make the scores balance.
  • League vs friendlies
    • We try hard to get everything to add up in league games, and this is made a lot easier by scoring on the app for at least our innings.
    • For friendlies it’s often messy and frequently we don’t bother to fix it unless it’s fairly easy to spot the error.

League scorecard requirements

The league has strict rules about how and when the basic result and full scorecard needs to be filled out for each match, with point penalties for failure to comply. Below are the relevant extracts from the handbook:

League – reporting the match result

  • HOME TEAM to report the result of the match on the club Play-Cricket website by midnight of the day of the match by entering:
    • the result,
    • team scores,
    • wickets down (a team with less than 11 players is “all out” ie 10 wickets down, if the last
      wicket falls)
    • overs bowled, and
    • bonus points of losing team (the winning team is automatically credited with 20 points).
  • This also includes matches which are abandoned, incomplete or conceded.
  • Use the highlights box to indicate any unusual circumstances, eg reduction of overs, and players
    who have scored at least 50 runs or taken at least 5 wickets.
  • Should the Play-Cricket website be “down”, the above details must be either emailed or text to the General Secretary at [email protected] or 07931 822686.

Note that we’ve never actually been required to enter bonus points (Play-Cricket does it for us) or highlight players who’ve performed well.

League – completing the scorecard

  • HOME TEAM to complete the match scorecard on the club Play-Cricket website by midday of the Monday following the match.
  • AWAY TEAM to check and if necessary complete the scorecard on the club Play-Cricket website by midday of the Tuesday following the match. This applies whether or not the home team has completed the scorecard.
  • All parts of the scorecard must be completed:
    • Names of all batsmen (leave space blank if less than 11 players)
    • Scores of each batsman
    • Names of all bowlers and fielders who took catches, stumpings and run outs
    • Number of byes, leg-byes, wides and no-balls
    • Scores at time of fall of wickets and the names of the batsmen
    • Bowling figures
  • Except for the opponents’ players’ names, the BATTING TEAM is responsible for the completion and accuracy of the details on their batting card including the bowlers’ figures. The BOWLING TEAM is responsible for completing the names of their players who took wickets, catches, stumpings and run outs, and for the names of the bowlers in the bowling figures.
  • The above details must be completed for abandoned matches where the game had started.

Excluding a match from Plough stats

  • There are times where we don’t want a match to count for Plough stats – e.g. a match with non-standard playing conditions (number of players etc.)
  • When entering the basic result information for the match, put the following text anywhere in the Highlights field:

Excluded from Ploughmans CC stats

Website

Intro

  • The club website at https://ploughmanscclegacy.com/ is a WordPress site.
  • It uses a range of WordPress plugins to implement the basic pages and tables, as well as a custom plugin to build the stats.

Accounts & login

  • For website administration, go to http://ploughmanscclegacy.com/wp-admin to log in.
  • This will take you to the WordPress dashboard. You can use the menu on the left hand side to access all aspects of the site’s operation.
  • A few club members have administrator user accounts to allow them to make website changes and do general maintenance.

Creating a new user account

  1. Login to the site and go to Users in the left-hand menu. You will see the existing user accounts.
  2. Click Add New in the top-left.
  3. Enter the details below:
    • Username – use the same naming pattern as we’ve done for other users
    • Email
    • First name
    • Last name
    • Role – Administrator
  4. Click Add New User
  5. Tell the user about their new account. They should have an email that will direct them to reset their password.

Pages

  • The basic pages of the website can be found under the Pages item on the left-hand menu after logging in.

WPBakery pages

  • Most pages have been built with the WPBakery Page Builder and can be edited via the Edit button that appears when you hover over the page name. This will open the bakery editor:
  • Text blocks can be edited by hovering over them and clicking the pencil icon:
  • When you’ve finished editing in the dialog that pops up and hit Save Changes, the change won’t be live yet. You can preview to see how the change will look when published with the Preview Changes button in the top right. Once you’re happy to publish the changes to the outside world, hit the Update button.
  • Adding extra blocks to a page / creating a new page is generally best done by duplicating an existing block or page and modifying it (i.e. follow the examples that are already there!)

Block editor pages

  • Some of the newer pages (including this one) use the WordPress block editor. You can edit them by clicking on “Edit (block editor)” that appears when you hover over the page name.
  • Editing is much simpler – see https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ for help.

Tables

  • All tabular data on the website (e.g. fixtures list, stats tables etc.) are implemented as tables using the Tablepress plugin. These tables can be accessed via the TablePress item in the left-hand menu.
  • The following tables are manually edited / updated:
    • Fixtures (for each season)
    • Nets (for each season)
    • History – Roll of Honour
  • Other tables are automatically updated as part of the Plough stats plugin that runs periodically:
    • All stats tables
    • League table (for each season and division)

Editing fixtures

The instructions below could easily apply to any other manually updated table, but most updates tend to be to the fixtures.

  1. Login to the site and go to TablePress in the left-hand menu. You will see the existing tables.
  2. Find the Fixtures table for the current season, hover over the name and click Edit. This will bring up the table content.
  3. Make whatever changes you need to (see below for different tasks) and hit Save Changes at the top of the page.

Adding or deleting a fixture

  • To add a new fixture, tick the box for the existing row that you want to appear after the new row. For example, if you wanted to insert a new fixture on Sat April 16, you would tick the row for the following Sunday:
  • Scroll to the bottom and click the Insert button next to “Selected rows”.
  • To delete a fixture, tick the row for the fixture and click Delete next to “Selected rows”.

Adding a scorecard link

  • After a match scorecard has been entered, we need to add a link to it in the Fixtures table.
  • Go to https://ploughmans.play-cricket.com/, then Matches -> Fixtures & Results, and find the relevant result.
  • Open the scorecard for the match and copy the Play-Cricket URL. For example, https://ploughmans.play-cricket.com/website/results/4967304.
  • Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Insert Link. If a message pops up explaining what to do, close it.
  • Scroll back up to the row for the relevant fixture and click-and-drag to highlight the oppo name:
  • At this point, the Insert/Edit Link popup should appear. Paste in the scorecard URL that you opened earlier and click Add Link:
  • The row in the table should end up looking something like this:

Stats

  • The club stats tables / pages are automatically generated by our custom Plough WordPress plugin.
  • See https://github.com/james-tisato/plough for a full description of how it works.
  • Generally speaking, this process will run automatically and you won’t need to do anything other than enter scorecards.

Clearing caches

  • A common problem after making a change to the site is that the change appears to you (as a logged in administrator) but not to the rest of the club (as anonymous users). This is most commonly caused by the previous content being cached.
  • In this situation, you can try clearing the caches:
    • Click “Purge SG Cache” in the top header of the page:
    • Go to Hummingbird -> Caching on the left hand menu, go to Page Caching and click Clear Cache
  • You can check that this has worked by visiting the relevant page when logged out / using an Ingognito window.

Match reports

  1. Go to Add New Post
  2. Set the post title to match the format used for other match reports, e.g. LEAGUE: Ploughmans CC vs Croydon CC (Home) Sat 1st August 2020 or Morden CC vs Ploughmans CC (Away) Sun 2nd August 2020
  3. In the post body, put “Match Report” at Heading 3 level and the report at Paragraph level:
  4. Click Preview in the top right corner of the page and double check it all looks as expected.
  5. When you’re happy with it, close the preview and click Publish on the right hand side of the new post page.
  6. Use the permalink underneath the post title to open the post in a new tab and keep it for later (when linking to the fixtures page):
  7. Go to the tables list and edit the Fixtures table for the current season:
  8. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Insert Link. If a message pops up explaining what to do, close it.
  9. Scroll back up to the row for the relevant fixture and click-and-drag to highlight the Result text (which should have been entered when the scorecards were uploaded):
  10. At this point, the Insert/Edit Link popup should appear. Paste in the match report post URL that you opened in a new tab earlier and click Add Link:
  11. The row in the fixtures table should end up looking something like this:
  12. Click Save Changes at the top of the page.
  13. Go to the Hummingbird Page Caching page and click Clear Cache on the right hand side.
  14. Go to the Fixtures page and make sure the relevant row now appears with the match report link.
  15. Publish the link on the club WhatsApp group.


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