Reviewing 2021 – The Year of REST

Last year was another stellar year for Tournamatch development. We paid off quite a bit of technical debt and finished building asynchronous user interfaces for just about every front end user action we support. Asynchronous user interfaces are quick, sexy, mobile friendly, and modern. They’re what allows a page to react to your button clicks and data without page reloads and navigation. For all the changes we made to front facing pages, the majority of the work necessary required building out a RESTful back end. A REST API endpoint now exists for every component of the software you may interact with. Adding REST API endpoints was an important step required for making the asynchronous usability changes, and it will pay huge dividends moving forward into 2022 and beyond.

In all, we published 15 updates in 2021. Besides making Tournamatch more RESTful, those updates added support for PHP 8, team social icons, team social fields, tournament bracket headers, 10 new shortcodes, added the ability to reward trophies, updated all list pages to be asynchronous, updated the entire backend to appear consistent with WordPress, and eliminated a lot of technical debt. We didn’t hit our goal of migrating to Custom Post Types (our goal from 2020 for 2021); however, that was a result of pivoting to other priorities.

For 2022, I expect we will continue to add your most requested new features. There are big improvements to the challenges system already in progress as well as work on Battle Royale tournaments and Best of X match support. In addition to those new features, my mission for Tournamatch this year is to focus on reducing the templating/skinning work necessary once you download the plugin. Tournamatch works out of the box well with most BootStrap templates; however, you have some CSS work to do if you venture outside of that scope. I aim to reduce or eliminate that as much as possible.

Of course, our title has a duel meaning. We didn’t just focus on making Tournamatch more RESTful this year – we also took time off for personal rest and recovery in the 4th quarter. A change in office location, preparation for a new child, and the stresses of life necessitated a break. I’m happy to share that my wife and I added another member to the Tournamatch family on December 29th. She is a happy, healthy, beautiful little girl named Abigail.

Thank you for your support in 2021, get some REST, and have a great day.