We pride ourselves on having what we think is not only the most customizable on-line fantasy football league management service on the web, but also the most "open", too. What that "open-ness" means to you, if you're someone with some computer programming and/or web design skills, is that you can extend and customize your MyFantasyLeague.com league a great deal.
Advanced customization options include:
| 1. | Writing custom CSS to completely control all aspects of your league appearance. |
| 2. | Getting access to "raw" MyFantasyLeague.com league data in industry-standard XML format. |
| 3. | Embedding league home page modules in other web pages. |
Writing custom CSS to completely control all aspects of your league appearance
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the industry-standard way of controlling all appearance-related items on web pages. MyFantasyLeague.com uses CSS to control league page appearance (including our skins), and also allows our customers to write their own CSS to completely control any/all page appearance options that you'd like to.
If you'd like to learn more about CSS, you might want to consider some on-line CSS tutorials, or visit your local or on-line bookstore for books on CSS - Eric Meyer seems to write especially good books on this topic.
Once you've learned CSS, next you'll have to learn a bit about the classes and IDs we use on the site. You can do that by setting up a free trial league on our site, and then doing a "View Source" to see our current CSS files, including the CSS files used for each of our skins, to get a better idea of how to write CSS for your MyFantasyLeague.com league pages.
Alternatively, here is another approach that might be easier, allowing you to see exactly what classes and IDs we use on your league pages:
| 1. | Download and install the Firefox web browser. |
| 3. | Go to the league page you're looking to customize. |
| 4. | From the custom toolbar that gets installed, choose the "Information > Display ID And Class Details" option, and you can see exactly what IDs and classes are used on any/all pages on the site. |
| 5. | Where this gets really cool is that you can edit the CSS right on the page, allowing you to immediately see the effects of your CSS changes right away. It will take a bit of time to play around with the web developer extension and learn about all of it's features and options, but this time will be very well spent if you're interested in really taking your design to the next level. |
Finally, once you've written your custom CSS, you can go to the For Commissioners > Setup > Appearance Setup > Images & Other URLs page and upload your custom CSS to our site (or, simply enter the URL for the CSS file on your own server).
Getting access to "raw" MyFantasyLeague.com league data in industry-standard XML format
If you're a computer programmer, we offer the MyFantasyLeague.com Developer's Program
whereby you can easily get access to raw MyFantasyLeague.com data in XML format. This will allow you to quickly and easily get that data into whatever programming environment you're most comfortable, be it PHP, ASP, Excel, Java, Perl, or any other programming language that's capable of reading XML files. This page
offers details of exactly what XML documents we offer via this service. For some examples of what others have done using our XML feed:
Embedding league home page modules in other web pages
All home page modules are "embeddable" - meaning, you can place "live" MyFantasyLeague.com content inside web pages on another web site, your "My Google" customized home page, or inside arbitrary HTML on your MyFantasyLeague.com-hosted pages. Check out the "Reports > League > Embed League Data" page available from all league pages to see how this option works. For examples of what some of our more creative customers have done with this feature, see http://www.returnofthechampions.com/ and http://uffle.com/ .
If you have any suggestions, questions or comments about any of the programs mentioned here, we'd love to hear your feedback on via your "Help > Help Center" page.
