What is jPickem?

What is jPickem?

jPickem is pickem pool football software (a Joomla 1.0.15 component) that has been developed at League.com for the past few years.   It's an online system that (at League.com) has been free to join, remains simple to use, and requires no great football skills to play.  After you join a group, all you do is login each week, make your picks, and then wait for the games to finish.   Scores are entered by the pool admin as they finish -- so group standings are calculated for you.

This site (jPickem) is a distribution point that allows you to run the same software on your own domain.  We are releasing the software as commercial open source with all of the funds being used to fuel more development.

Some History

This was conceived at a Mexican restaurant in Tempe Arizona in 2004.

Season 1 (2004) was a pickem pool built from scratch. By the time the first season had ended, we realized building it without leveraging some pre-existing open source efforts was going to be a long road. Our conclusion came from both a development perspective and the business model aspect of getting others to accept the product.

Season 2 we tossed out what we had from 2004 and rebuilt what was then still called League in an open source CMS called Mambo.

In 2006 we converted to Joomla! and continued to add and refine. We experimented with the idea of widening the scope to Rugby by using with the Super 14 Tournament, but eventually realized that Rugby and American Football are just not the same thing. At the end of Season 3, we removed all Rugby features.

In Season 4 we added more features like showing the schedule and overall standings in home page modules. We also enhanced the Pick Wizard to make it a bit more clever. We finally got around to writing the business plan on which Season 5 would be based.

In August, 2008 we plan to officially release League (aka jPickem) as a Joomla! component.  We will continue to run the application on League.com as our official demo/development site.  We had to give League a new identity here to offer the product as Joomla! component/web service.

If you're a Joomla! webmaster, click here. If you just want to add a pickem pool to your group, click here instead.