Bracket modules for external websites, finally!

Challongers can finally host brackets on their own websites. To help cover some of our hosting costs and avoid cluttering the bracket modules with ads, we decided to charge a modest amount for them. Most small venues will get excellent mileage for next to no cash (5,000 uses for $5; 20,000 for $15). The modules are ad-free and you can report scores and log in/out from within them - read more here.

Bracket Module Beta Testing

Bracket modules are finally in beta. If you're interested in testing them, send me a request along with your Challonge account email address (http://challonge.com/dashboard/contact). Beta testers who send me feedback will earn some extra module use credits when this feature is production ready.

The Challonge favicon was just updated and I also added "apple-touch-icon.png" for iPhone users who bookmark the site.

Up next:

• T-shirts - struggling with ideas here. If you come up with a great idea and I go with it, I'll definitely send you a free t-shirt. 
• FAQ / Help page, brief screencasts?
  
• Tournament tagging -- need to think this one over as I want to keep things simple.
• Single elimination display options for conference tournaments - 2 or 4 brackets converging to the center

New Logo!

Just posted the new Challonge logo. It's good to know a graphics guy (thanks Chuy)! I haven't touched up the stylesheets to match the new shade of orange, but hey, I was anxious to get it up there. T-shirts are inevitable.

Major Upgrade Complete

Here are the highlights:

• Participant management rewritten
• Participants can be entered with a name and email address - the giant textarea for entering names has been dropped (except for the bracket generator)
  
• Email addresses are looked up immediately and linked to Challonge accounts (previously not done until bracket was published)
  
• Drag-n-drop ordering/seeding
• Participants can unregister themselves prior to tourney start
•  Tournament Sign-up pages
• Challonge users can sign-up with a name or team instead of having to use account default (previously not possible until bracket was published)
• Upon registering, non-challonge users are given a link to unregister in case their plans change
• If you sign up for a tournament using your Challonge account, the tournament organizer will not be able to see your email address. The organizer can only see email addresses that he/she enters.
• Score and outcome editing for tournament organizers (finally)!
• Multi-set score view displayed when hovering over a match
• Round robin rewrite
• Scalable
• Easier to read
• Dashboard changes
• Paginated table view of tournaments
• Table view of open matches
• Print preview views now apply the print stylesheet, so you don't have to use your browser's print preview for the real preview
• Contact/Support now requires Konami Code to send comments... a nice alternative to captcha if you ask me

Bracket module documentation is coming along nicely. I still have a couple admin pages to write for them, but modules should go public in October. Here's a pretty bland module sample. As this demonstrates, you can choose to hide the upper-right control box and arrows, and all the colors are customizable. There'll be flashier samples in the docs later.

If you're interested in beta testing the bracket module, send me your challonge account email address via Contact/Support on challonge.com

Challonge! == David Cornelius

Effective this morning, my name is "Challonge!", and I will now use "its" and "we" instead of "his" and "me." Very exciting stuff. This will give Challonge.com a slightly more professional feel when we start selling t-shirts and anything else down the road. Or maybe I just want a business credit card with "CHALLONGE!" on it...

In other exciting news, my buddy's working on a new slick logo for the site. This will help drive Challonge.com to second level (please watch the movie Zardoz). I'm hoping to launch this along with t-shirts, bracket modules (documentation and support pages about 50% complete), and some other site improvements.

SSL and some bracket module news

Challonge is now set up for secure connections, so most account-related pages will be routed through https. In case you're wondering, the main reason for adding the SSL cert is for running some Google Checkout tests.

Bracket modules are fully functional, but documentation is pretty much nonexistent at the moment. I'll be rolling these out after returning from vacation, so I'll either be inviting beta testers or throwing the modules straight into production.

Legal Stuff

Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy were added to Challonge. Thanks to Automattic for the open licensing of their legal docs (and the other great free services they provide). I love how website Terms of Service basically make you the Internet God... until you're in court, then who knows.

And in case you're wondering, the docs offer no surprises. I will never give up private information unless law requires me to do so.