Ploegkalender België

Ploegkalender België shows football fixtures for Belgian clubs. Pick your club, tick the teams you want to show, and the plugin does the rest. The full calendar is stored in its own table and updated with WP-Cron, so results can come in week after week.

This plugin is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA / KBVB) or Voetbal Vlaanderen. It reads publicly available match-center data and is not an official product of those organisations.

Features:

• Choose a club via its club page URL, then tick teams from one list
• Several teams side by side, each with its own label (for example “U13” or “First team”)
• Automatic sync hourly, twice a day, daily, or weekly
• Manual sync in one click, with a report per team
• Display as a table, cards, month calendar, or a compact homepage block
• Detects your own side so wins, losses, and draws can be highlighted
• Front-end cache that is cleared after every sync

Shortcodes

For a team page you only need one:

• [rbfa_ploeg team="U13"] — one card with the next match, last result, standings, and upcoming fixtures.

To compose the page yourself:

• [rbfa_tabel team="U13"] — full calendar for one team as a table, with scores when they are known.
• [rbfa_programma aantal="5"] — the next five matches, compact view for the homepage.
• [rbfa_uitslagen aantal="5"] — the last five played matches.
• [rbfa_stand team="Eerste Elftal"] — league table with your own team highlighted.
• [rbfa_positie team="Eerste Elftal"] — one line of text, for example “8th of 18 with 6 points”.
• [rbfa_kalender] — all matches in a month calendar. Browse with Previous and Next. Optional: team="U13" and uitslag="nee".

• [rbfa_homepage link="/kalender/"] — the next five matches of all teams, with the team label per match and a button to the club calendar. Set link to the path (or page ID) of the page that contains [rbfa_kalender]. Optional: aantal, titel, knop, and ploeg="nee".

  [rbfa_ploeg] has its own attributes: stand and kalender (ja or nee), aantal for the length of the upcoming list, plus titel. For [rbfa_stand] you can shorten the table to the top teams with aantal.

  [rbfa_wedstrijden] is the full form the others are based on. These attributes work on every shortcode:

• team — team ID or team label. Several values, comma-separated. Empty = all teams.

• type — alles, programma, or uitslagen.
• aantal — maximum number of matches. 0 = all.
• reeks — ja (default) or nee: show the series name.
• uitslag — ja (default) or nee: show the score column.
• series — filter by a series ID.
• layout — kaarten, tabel, or compact.
• titel — optional title above the list.

Example: [rbfa_programma team="U13" aantal="3"]

The [rbfa_*] shortcode names are kept so existing sites keep working. They do not mean this is an official RBFA product.

Trademark

Ploegkalender België is an unofficial, independent plugin by Creativitijd. “RBFA”, “KBVB”, “Royal Belgian Football Association”, and “Voetbal Vlaanderen” belong to their respective owners. Those names appear only to describe the public match-center data source and to state that there is no affiliation.

Where do I find the club ID?

Look up your club on voetbalvlaanderen.be and open its club page. The URL ends with /club/ followed by a number, for example https://www.voetbalvlaanderen.be/club/2264. That number is the club ID; paste the full URL or the number in the Club field.

You do not need to look up team IDs: after you pick your club, the plugin loads all teams with their IDs. To follow a team from another club, use the lookup tool under “Look up a team ID” on Club & teams.

When does the sync run?

Under Ploegkalender > Settings you choose the frequency and the exact time, for example every Monday at 06:00. That hour uses the site timezone and stays the same after the switch to daylight saving time: after each run the plugin puts the schedule back on the chosen hour.

By default WordPress uses WP-Cron. It has no real clock: it checks on a page view whether something is due. On a quiet club site the sync therefore starts at the first visit after the scheduled time.

To run it on time, disable WP-Cron in wp-config.php:

define( 'DISABLE_WP_CRON', true );

and let your server call wp-cron.php every five minutes:

*/5 * * * * curl -fsS -m 60 "https://yoursite.example/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron" > /dev/null 2>&1

The Schedule block on Settings shows the next sync, whether WP-Cron is on or off, and the exact crontab lines with a copy button. Note: after this change every scheduled WordPress task uses that server cron, including scheduled posts and tasks from other plugins.

Standings

Each sync also loads the league table. The Standings column on Club & teams shows the current position per team, or “none”.

The match center does not publish standings for youth series. For those teams there is nothing to fetch: [rbfa_stand] reports that no table is available and the standings block in [rbfa_ploeg] hides itself. Early in the season a table may also be missing until matches have been played.

Data source

The data comes from the unofficial GraphQL backend behind the public Voetbal Vlaanderen match center. That is not an official documented API and can change without notice. If the sync suddenly stops working, their query has likely changed. Club logos are not fetched or shown: those are third-party works.

This plugin does not use an official RBFA or Voetbal Vlaanderen API and is not an official product of those organisations.

Scores

Each sync loads the calendar, opponents, series, and scores when the match center has published them. Scores you entered by hand are kept; an official score takes precedence in the display. Missing scores can still be entered under Ploegkalender > Loaded matches.

External services

This plugin connects to the public GraphQL backend behind the Voetbal Vlaanderen / RBFA match center (https://datalake-prod2018.rbfa.be/graphql) to load club teams, fixtures, scores, and league tables. That is not an official documented API.

When an administrator looks up a club or team, and on each scheduled or manual sync, the plugin sends a GraphQL query with a club ID or team ID and a language code. It does not send WordPress user accounts, e-mail addresses, or visitor data.

This plugin is not affiliated with RBFA or Voetbal Vlaanderen. Those organisations provide the public match-center data. Their terms and privacy policy:

• RBFA terms and conditions
• RBFA privacy policy
• Voetbal Vlaanderen terms of use
• Voetbal Vlaanderen privacy statement