Guided Tours

JoomLeague installs two native Joomla Guided Tours. They use Joomla's own tour system, appear only in the administrator application and are synchronised during every JoomLeague installation or update. Synchronisation is idempotent: updating the package keeps one copy of each tour and replaces its JoomLeague-owned steps with the current definition.

Neither tour starts automatically. An administrator decides when to run it.

Where to start a tour

Immediately after package installation, the result screen offers Start guided tour and Create competition actions. Later, open Joomla's Guided Tours menu from the administrator header or go to System → Manage → Guided Tours and select one of these tours:

• Getting started with JoomLeague
• Create a complete competition foundation

Both tours begin in the JoomLeague administrator context. If a tour cannot find its highlighted element, return to Components → JoomLeague → Dashboard, close other administrator dialogs and start it again.

Getting started tour

This is a read-only six-step orientation. It never creates, changes or deletes a record.

1. System overview explains the dashboard counters and the empty state of a new installation. Bundled profiles exist, but user competition data does not.
2. Sport Profiles identifies the rule definitions from which runtime sport types are created. Profiles contain scoring, positions, event types, statistics and template defaults.
3. Competitions explains the reusable identity that can span many seasons. A competition is not itself a scheduled edition.
4. Projects introduces the operational competition edition that owns entries, stages, programme, results and standings.
5. Templates explains sport-profile defaults and per-project overrides.
6. Tools points to controlled SQL data exchange, diagnostics, language management and maintenance operations.

Use this tour for administrators who need to understand where data belongs before entering anything.

Interactive competition tour

The interactive tour creates a minimum connected foundation through the same forms and validation used during normal administration. It does not bypass ACL, validation, CSRF protection or profile compatibility checks.

Before starting, prepare:

• a unique sport type name and machine code;
• the sport profile to use;
• the public competition name;
• a season label such as 2026 or 2026/27;
• a project name and a project format supported by the selected profile.

You need permission to create sport types, competitions, seasons and projects. Existing records are not automatically reused: this tour demonstrates the creation of four new records.

Steps 1–6: sport type

1. The preparation step explains the four records that will be saved.
2. Joomla redirects to the new Sport Type form.
3. Enter an administrator-facing name, for example Football.
4. Enter a unique lowercase code containing letters, numbers, hyphens or underscores, for example football or senior_football.
5. Select one published, active sport-profile version.
6. Save the sport type. The three initialization switches determine whether the profile's positions, event types and statistics are copied into the editable runtime catalogs. They default to Yes.

The profile version becomes the sport type's contract source. Projects later copy that exact version reference, which prevents a rule change from silently changing an existing project's result meaning.

Steps 7–9: competition

7. Joomla redirects to the new Competition form.
8. Enter the stable public competition name. This should identify the competition across seasons, not one particular edition.
9. Save. Optional codes, organisation, country and description can be added later without interrupting the tour.

Steps 10–12: season

10. Joomla redirects to the new Season form.
11. Enter a season label. Exact start and end dates are intentionally not required because many organisations do not know them when setting up the competition.
12. Save the season.

Steps 13–20: project

13. Joomla redirects to the new Project form.
14. Enter the name of this operational competition edition.
15. Select the competition created earlier.
16. Select the season created earlier.
17. Select the new sport type.
18. Select a project format allowed by that sport profile, such as league, cup, tournament, race or fight card. An incompatible format is rejected when saving.
19. Save the project. The profile version is assigned automatically from the sport type; it is not manually selected on the project.
20. The projects list opens with the newest ID first. Open the new project to continue from its Project Panel.

What the tour deliberately does not create

The tour stops at a valid project foundation. It does not invent:

• clubs, teams, people or venues;
• project entries or participant memberships;
• stages, stage assignments or transitions;
• rounds or programme items;
• lineups, officials, events, statistics or results;
• frontend menu items or published modules.

Those records depend on the sport profile and the real competition. Creating football teams for an individual running race, for example, would violate the universal model. Continue with Project Setup, then Stages, Rounds & Progression and Scheduling.

Stopping, restarting and repeating

You may close a tour at any point. Records saved before closing remain saved; unsaved form values do not. Before restarting the interactive tour, either continue manually from the existing records or choose new unique names and codes. Re-running with the same sport type code will correctly fail uniqueness validation rather than modifying the previous record.

Updating JoomLeague restores missing tour definitions, but never removes the competition records you created through a tour.

When the tour is unavailable

Check the following in order:

1. Confirm the complete pkg_joomleague package was installed, not only an extracted component archive.
2. Confirm Joomla's Guided Tours component and system plugin are enabled.
3. Confirm your administrator account can access JoomLeague and the forms used by the interactive tour.
4. Update/reinstall the same current package. Tour synchronisation is safe to repeat.
5. Clear Joomla administrator cache if translated titles or targets remain stale after an update.

The tour definitions are language-neutral records whose titles and descriptions use JoomLeague language constants. Their UI follows the active administrator language.