SE Live Blog gives you everything you need to run professional live coverage directly from your Joomla site, with no external services, no subscriptions, and no JavaScript frameworks to manage.

In sports mode, the match header displays a full-width score panel with competition name, round, venue, team names, logos, and a live status pill. Scores update automatically via a lightweight AJAX polling mechanism that only calls the server once per interval regardless of how many visitors are viewing the page, thanks to a file-based micro-cache layer. When a new entry is posted, visitors see a notification bar and optionally hear a chime; the feed scrolls in the new content without a page reload.

Each sport format comes with a purpose-built score detail editor in the Joomla admin. Rugby tracks tries, penalty tries, conversions, penalties, and drop goals and computes the headline score automatically. Tennis tracks sets and derives the set count from completed sets only, so a 5-3 in-progress set does not incorrectly advance the scoreline. American football sums quarters, ice hockey and similar formats sum periods, and baseball sums innings. Cricket operates differently by design: the innings breakdown is the score, and the headline figure is replaced with the match result text.

The component ships with a module, mod_seliveblog, which renders a compact scoreboard widget suitable for a sidebar, homepage, or widget area. The module polls independently and updates scores, status, and match detail live without any page interaction from the visitor.

News mode turns SE Live Blog into a conventional rolling live blog for events, elections, product launches, or any time-sensitive coverage. Both modes share the same entry editor, the same polling infrastructure, and the same sound and viewer count features.

All output is fully themeable via CSS custom properties. Typography, colours, overlay opacity, and logo dimensions are all configurable from the component and module parameters without touching code.

Technical Requirements
SE Live Blog requires Joomla 5.0 or later (Joomla 6 compatible). PHP 8.1 or later is required. No additional libraries, CDN dependencies, or third-party accounts are needed. The component uses standard Joomla MVC conventions throughout.

Limitations
SE Live Blog uses a polling architecture rather than persistent connections (WebSockets). This means score updates reach visitors on the next poll interval rather than instantaneously. The default polling interval is 30 seconds and can be reduced per feed, though intervals below 10 seconds are not recommended on shared hosting.

The micro-cache collapses repeated database queries from multiple simultaneous visitors into a single query per poll interval per feed. In testing, a single feed can comfortably serve several hundred simultaneous visitors on a standard cPanel shared hosting environment. For high-traffic deployments — sustained audiences of 1,000 or more concurrent visitors per feed — a VPS or dedicated server with an opcode cache (OPcache) enabled is recommended.

Auto-calculation of the headline score from the breakdown editor is available for rugby, tennis, gridiron, periods, and baseball formats. Football (soccer) and other simple-format sports require the score to be entered directly, as there is no breakdown data to derive it from. Cricket does not expose a headline score field at all; the innings detail is the definitive score for that format.

The component does not include live data feeds or score ingestion from external providers. All match data is entered manually by an administrator or editorial team.

An iOS/Android companion App will developed in the near future depending on demand.

Languages: Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese, Dutch, Arabic, Turkish