WP SailingFlow docs

Introduction

WP SailingFlow is a complete race-management toolkit for sailing clubs that run PHRF handicap racing — installed as a single WordPress plugin on your own site.

It organizes your racing calendar and fleets, calculates corrected times and World Sailing Low-Point scores, and renders schedules, scratch sheets, individual race results, and series standings on your public pages through shortcodes. Everything lives in your WordPress admin — no spreadsheets, no separate scoreboard service, and no second login for your race committee.

This guide walks through installing the plugin, modelling your season, registering boats, entering finish times, and publishing the results.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0 or newer
• PHP 7.4 or newer
• An administrator account, or any user granted the manage_sailing_flow capability

WP SailingFlow is self-contained: it bundles its own autoloader and assets, so there is nothing to compile and no Composer step to run on your server.

Installation

1. Download the plugin zip from your account (or install the free edition from the WordPress.org directory once available).
2. Upload it in your WordPress admin under Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, then choose the wp-sailing-flow.zip file.
3. Activate the plugin. On activation it creates its database tables and seeds a default division list (Spinnaker and Jib & Main).
4. Open SailingFlow in the admin sidebar to reach the dashboard.

Core concepts

WP SailingFlow models a club's racing as a four-level hierarchy. Understanding it makes everything else fall into place.

A few things worth knowing:

• The public schedule is driven by the race date, not by membership — every dated race appears on its year's schedule, including schedule-only events like practices and socials.
• A boat keeps its identity across seasons. Its division, sail number, and PHRF rating are stored per Racing Series, so a boat can move divisions or change ratings between seasons without losing its history.
• Stand-alone scored races belong to no series or regatta. They carry their own roster and scoring settings, get their own results page, and never appear in any standings.

The admin menu

After activation you'll find a SailingFlow menu in the WordPress sidebar with these screens:

Your first season

A typical setup, start to finish:

1. Create an Overall Season for the year (e.g. 2026).
2. Add a Racing Series to that season. Choose its scoring method and, if you run a long series, set up throwouts.
3. Create one or more Regattas under the series — each becomes a column in the standings.
4. Register your fleet on the Scratch Sheet, giving every boat a division, sail number, and PHRF rating for the series.
5. Add Races and assign each to the season, series, and regatta it belongs to.
6. Publish your pages by placing the shortcodes (below) on a schedule page, a standings page, and so on.

From there your race-night routine is just Enter Results after each race.

Divisions & boats

Divisions are a fully managed list. The plugin seeds two to match the common model — Spinnaker (S) and Jib & Main (M) — but you can rename, add, or remove them to fit your club.

Boats live in a master registry with their own identity. A boat's competitive details — division, sail number, and PHRF rating — are not stored on the boat itself; they're stored on its registration in a series. That separation is what lets a boat change divisions or ratings between seasons while keeping a single, continuous history.

The scratch sheet

The scratch sheet is the boat roster of a Racing Series. Registering a boat there records its division, sail number, and PHRF rating for that series. Because registrations are per-series:

• A boat's Summer and Fall ratings or divisions can differ.
• A boat can be entered in two divisions within one series if your club allows it.
• Publishing the scratch sheet with [wpsf_scratch_sheet] shows the registered boats grouped by division.

Entering results

Open Enter Results, pick the race, and enter each boat's finish time. The plugin computes elapsed and corrected times and assigns points automatically. A few things to know:

• Results stay editable after you submit them — fix a typo or a protest outcome anytime and the standings recalculate.
• Conditions and notes can be recorded per race and surface on the race-details view.
• Cancelled races are marked cancelled (not scored), kept off the standings, and shown as cancelled on the schedule with the reason in a tooltip.
• Clear Results is a confirmed do-over: it removes all results and per-division parameters for a race and resets its status to Scheduled, while keeping the race itself.
• For a stand-alone race, you also pick the boats and set each one's division, PHRF, and sail number right on this screen.

How scoring works

WP SailingFlow scores PHRF handicap racing under the Racing Rules of Sailing 2025–2028.

• Corrected time is calculated by time-on-distance by default. Time-on-time scoring (Corrected = Elapsed × A / (B + PHRF), with editable A/B factors) is available per series. Pro
• Points use the World Sailing Low-Point system (RRS A4): first place scores 1 point, second 2, and so on.
• Non-finishers are scored under RRS A5.2 (entries + 1) by default. An optional A5.3 mode scores a boat that came to the start but didn't finish against the number of boats that came, rather than the full entry list. Pro
• Ties in a single race are averaged per RRS A7; series ties are broken per RRS Appendix A8.

Standings & throwouts

Standings are produced per Racing Series, with one column per Regatta showing each boat's net total in that regatta.

Throwouts let you drop a boat's worst races once enough have been sailed. Pro A series can define a tiered schedule — for example, drop 1 after 8 races and 2 after 10. The plugin applies the largest tier whose race threshold has been reached (counted across all regattas in the series), shows the reduction in the regatta column as (−n), and never drops so many that a boat scores nothing. A non-excludable disqualification (DNE) is never dropped, as the rules require.

On phones, the standings keep the Place and Boat columns frozen while the score columns scroll horizontally, so boats stay easy to read.

Scoring codes

In addition to a finish time, you can mark a boat with any standard RRS scoring abbreviation. All are scored under RRS A5.2 (entries + 1) unless A5.3 is enabled.

Shortcodes

Place any of these on a WordPress page or post to render that view. They produce responsive, theme-aware output and stay in sync with your data automatically.

For example, a standings page for your summer series:

[wpsf_series_title series="4"]
[wpsf_standings series="4"]

Or a single regatta's standings:

[wpsf_standings regatta="12"]

URL parameters

Several shortcodes can take their context from the page URL instead of a fixed attribute, which is what makes a single results page work for every race. The plugin's own links use these automatically:

• ?wpsf_race= — for [wpsf_race_results] and [wpsf_race_details]
• ?wpsf_series= — for [wpsf_scratch_sheet], [wpsf_series_title], and [wpsf_standings]
• ?wpsf_regatta= — for a single regatta in [wpsf_standings]
• ?year= — for [wpsf_schedule]

A URL parameter, when present, takes precedence over the matching shortcode attribute.

Legacy tags

If you're upgrading from a 1.x install, the old shortcode tags remain registered as aliases, so existing pages keep working without edits:

The standings shortcode also accepts the old cup="ID" attribute and ?wpsf_cup= parameter as aliases for regatta.

Free vs Pro

The full race-management workflow — seasons, series, regattas, races, divisions, boats, the scratch sheet, time-on-distance scoring, stand-alone races, and every shortcode — is free. Pro adds:

• Tiered series throwouts
• Time-on-Time scoring
• RRS A5.3 penalty scoring
• Automatic result & cancellation emails, with one-click per-recipient unsubscribe

Troubleshooting

A shortcode shows nothing

Most shortcodes need to know which series or race to render. Make sure you've passed the right series / race attribute, or that the page URL carries the matching ?wpsf_… parameter. An unknown or empty ID renders nothing rather than an error.

A race isn't on the schedule

The schedule is built from race dates by year. Confirm the race has a date in the year you're viewing — membership in a series is not required to appear.

Standings look wrong after editing a result

Standings recalculate when results are saved. Re-open Enter Results for the affected race, confirm the finish times and codes, and save again to force a recalculation.

A Pro feature isn't available

Throwouts, Time-on-Time, A5.3, and result emails require an active Pro license. Check the license status on the Settings screen.