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First steps

You've installed the component and are looking at the dashboard for the first time, which can be a bit much at first glance. In this article I will show you how to start, depending on the scenario and what you basically have to consider when using it.

The dashboard

You can access all areas of the component via the dashboard. The settings can be found via the Options button at the top right.

fm dashboard

 CREATE THE FIRST CONTENT

Depending on the target group you use the component for, you can invest more time in different areas than in others. No matter what you do, you should start as follows:

First create a Season, in our case we create the Season 2020 for this we click in the Dashboard on the item Seasons, in the Seasons overview we create a new Season via the button in the upper left corner and simply name it "2020". That's all, if we save them now we have created our first Season. Later we can assign games to Seasons so that they can be displayed in the desired context.

Next, we create our leagues. There are no defaults for creating a new league. I use the leagues "Seniors" / "International" / "U19" etc. in my installations. Which leagues you create is up to you. Use the designations defined in your association environment. In the league settings we also define the points a team gets when it wins, loses or draws a match. The field "Photo" is optional and has not been used yet. Later we can assign games to leagues so that they can be displayed in the desired context.

In the third step I create the Season Phases or Divisions. The Season Phases section is simply an optional third way of categorizing your games / teams. Here you can create divisions or simple phases like "Pre-Season" or "Regular-Season". Later we can assign games to season phases so that they can be displayed in the desired context.

Another must-have so that we can enter games are the teams, after all you have to define who plays against whom... So in the fourth step we now select the teams in the dashboard (or via the menu on the left) and again create our first new team with the button on the top left. First, we enter the name of the team above the tabs. Tihuana Tigers is a strong name, isn't it? In the details tab we have various items that should be self-explanatory, The short name is partly used on small screens or can be displayed instead of the full name depending on the module. Our modules will use the team color for accents within the module. The intro text here is for a short info about the team and will be displayed in our modules if configured accordingly. The full description can be found in the Description tab. We don't go into the other tabs at the moment but you can have a look ;-).

FM Manuals Tigers edit

While you are at it, create at least a second team, so we can enter the games later.

We have created the Season,League,Division(optional) and the teams, now we need a location where our games can take place. We can do this in the Locations section. Here, too, the input mask should be self-explanatory. For the absolute minimum of data, we simply need the name of the stadium. Once that is done we can get down to the nitty gritty and create our games.

Register games

In order to be able to enter games, a lot of preparatory work has to be done first, but fortunately we have already done that and we are now ready to enter the first game. The biggest magic happens in the Details section (at least for now...). First we select the home and the guest team from the list of our created teams. If an entry is missing - please remember that the team must have the status "published" before it can be selected. As location we choose the previously created stadium. The specification of a matchday is optional in the backend you can sort by matchday and find matches faster. In the lower part of the detail tab we find the scores where we can note how the score is and adjust it at any time. Note: If you work with individual scores, you do not need to manage the score here. But more about this in the corresponding chapter.

The foundation stone is laid, you have created the first teams and entered your first game.Look around a bit more, there is still a lot to discover.

An important note at the end: Actually you should have read this already at least once but for the sake of completeness here again: The FootballManager is fully functional but has no integrated view to display / list games in the frontend of your website. For this you have to subscribe to either the "Games Module for FootballManager" (to display a list of all games - demo here) or the "NextGame Module for FootballManager" (Countdown to the next event - demo here). Alternatively you can get all extensions in a package for a reduced price here

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