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How To Create WordPress LIVE Scores Website with Football Leagues Plugin

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create your own live scores football website using WordPress and API data. You can check out a real-life example here – footballan.com.

Hosting

First of all, we need good hosting for our site. I recommend Cloudways or RunCloud with the cloud server you want.

cloudways hosting

RunCloud is cheaper, faster, and supports more server providers, but you may have difficulty setting it up, and it is not recommended for beginners.

runcloud hosting

The main difference is that RunCloud is not a host. It is just a control panel. You need to buy a VPS separately and then connect it to RunCloud. You can choose from DigitalOcean, Vultr, UpCloud, or other supported providers.

Cloudways and Runcloud have great tutorials that teach users how to install WordPress.

WordPress Theme and Plugins

Football Leagues works with the most themes out of the box.

There are many free WordPress themes, and Kadence, GeneratePress, and Blocksy are my favorites. In our tutorial, we will stay on GeneratePress.

Then we should install the required WordPress plugins:

anwp football leagues premium

Don’t forget to set the website’s timezone before importing data from the API. Go to “Settings” >> “General” and select your timezone from the dropdown list.

set up proper timezone

API Data Provider – api-football.com

To get an import data API key, go to api-football.com, sign up, and buy a subscription. You can start with the Pro plan.

I recommend you use a direct subscription. It has some advantages and a user-friendly dashboard.

api-football

Copy and paste your API key into the plugin’s settings page, and check the other import options.

After that, visit the Statistics page and sync your data structure with an API.

Start API Import

Now we are ready to work on importing data.

Go to Import API – Dashboard. From that page, we can run all current daily and weekly tasks. We can see the warning message that our plugin has no import configuration. Let’s create it.

Go to “All API Leagues” and select a tournament you want to import. Some of them have Automatic Import Wizard. See the A letter in the upper right corner. In that case, open Wizard and run it.

Wait some time and close the Wizard when finished.

Home Page

Now it’s time to create the Home page with a cool shortcode – “Calendar Slider.” In this part, I’ll show you how to insert plugin shortcodes in two different ways into the Gutenberg editor.

Create a new page and add the Classic block. Then click on the ball icon and select the Calendar Slider shortcode from the dropdown list.

Check all shortcode arguments and click on the “Insert Shortcode” button.

Let’s add a shortcode to this page in another way. Go to the plugin Shortcode Builder, select “Calendar Slider”, check all arguments, and copy the generated code.

Then add the Shortcode block to the Gutenberg page and paste the code into it.

In the last step, we will update our site’s homepage settings. Go to “Settings” – “Reading”, set our homepage, and save. Go to our site’s main URL, and check the Calendar Slider output.

Live Scores Import

Now I’ll show you how to set up API LIVE Import.

First of all, we need to enable the LIVE score plugin functionality. Go to “Settings & Tools” >> “FL+ Configurator” >> “LIVE” and activate the “Enable LIVE scores” option. You can also check other LIVE settings.

The plugin allows you to add LIVE data in two ways: manually or automatically with the help of API Import. After activating that option, we can add data in manual mode.

Let’s turn on LIVE Data Import from our API provider. Go to “Settings & Tools” >> “FL+ Configurator” >> “Import API” and activate the “Import LIVE Data from API” option. By the way, you can turn on Predictions import here too.

Finally, we should schedule the API LIVE import.

Go to the “Dashboard” and select the appropriate leagues. Then click on the “Schedule” button. The status will be changed to “Active”.

Let’s check how it works. Switch to our home page and reload it.

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