Featured Community Plugin - MLB Season Standings

This post is part of a series, featuring the incredible work of plugin authors who grow the TRMNL plugin ecosystem with every contribution. The TRMNL team has individually selected these plugins and authors to be featured.

MLB Season Standings

Community member Alain created the MLB Season Standings plugin; here are their words on how it was created.

Why did you want this plugin to exist?

When last year's baseball season was over, my plugin tracking one's favorite team's stats quickly became obsolete, and to avoid having a static data on screen for 6 months I replaced it with the end of season standings.At some point, I thought that this would deserve its own plugin, regularly updated, with more stats, so when the new season started, it was a perfect moment for me to get to work on that plugin, plus also work on TRMNL-X compatibility and specificities, and also deliver cleaner code that would leverage the transform and shared parts of the TRMNL framework.

Were you inspired by any other recipes or plugin creators?

Not really, I admit that the initial version of this plugin was really created in a rush, just to have something useful to show on screen once last year season was over. So it was more about, "what can the MLB API give me quickly that can be interesting to see for 6 months" and not really about a thoughtful ideation process.

How did you balance look vs functionality?

There's quite a lot of data to display if you want to see the full baseball league, so for me the look was the main and most important part of the plugin. I had to find a design that would make it legible at a glance, while being comprehensive enough so that you don't *need* another plugin to get clarifications.

What was your process for creating the plugin?

At one point I drafted very quickly a mockup in Figma, but rapidly realized that the amount of data / number of teams wouldn't let me be so creative.

What, if any, challenges did you face while creating it?

Not really a challenge, but the past plugins I had done were somewhat quick and dirty; for this one I wanted to go all the way and understand the TRMNL X compatibility challenges, and experiment with as many features from the development framework as possible.

Did you learn anything you want to apply to future recipes?

That will sound very newb but the relationships between the layouts, shared and transform parts of code is much clearer for me now.

What's your next plugin going to be?

I'd like to work on something to show incoming movie / videogames / tvshows releases :)

What is your favorite plugin that someone else created and why?

Probably the xkcd comic one, it's always a blast to read Randall Munroe's crazy creations.