Creating a World Cup 2014 WordPress Widget

Football is undoubtedly the most popular and prestigious sporting game in the world. It is globally governed by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport’s international administrative body.

The FIFA World Cup, usually referred to simply as the World Cup is a competition hosted every four years, contested by the senior men’s national teams of qualified countries. This year’s tournament hosted in Brazil is currently ongoing.

While reading Hackers News, I stumbled upon an API for the World Cup that scrapes current match results and outputs match data as JSON.

You can get the following World Cup data from this API:

• All match data, updated every minute


• Today’s matches


• Tomorrow’s matches


• Matches for any country by entering their FIFA Code


• The current match if a match is happening, otherwise nothing.


• Results for group stage (wins, losses, draws, goals_for, goals_against)

I love football and I know a lot of us do too. Due to my busy schedule, I always find myself asking friends about the match schedule.

To eliminate this barrier, I decided to build a Match Fixtures widget for WordPress that displays a list of matches to be played today and tomorrow, powered by the World Cup API.

Building the Fixtures Widget

The Fixture widget to be developed at the end of this tutorial will be a tabbed widget; the first tab displays matches for today and the second tab displays matches for the next day.

Let’s get started with widget plugin development.

First, we need to include the plugin header. Without the header, WordPress won’t recognize the widget plugin.

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