SE Live Blog is a real-time live blogging component for Joomla 5 and 6, built for news publishers, sports clubs, and event organisers. It delivers live score updates, rolling commentary, and sport-specific detail breakdowns directly from your own site — no third-party services, no embedded feeds, and no monthly SaaS fees.

Available as a free edition and a one-time-purchase Pro edition.

Why self-hosted matters

Embedded live blog widgets put your coverage on someone else's servers. That means third-party advertising you don't control appearing next to your editorial, third-party trackers loading on your domain under your GDPR liability, and an archive that isn't yours and disappears if the provider changes terms.

SE Live Blog keeps all of it on your site. Your coverage, your advertising, your data, your search visibility.

Free vs Pro
Free Pro
News mode rolling coverage Yes Yes
Entries per feed Unlimited Unlimited
Concurrent live feeds 1 Unlimited
Authors per feed 1 Unlimited
Minimum polling interval 60 seconds 10 seconds
Archived feeds stay published Yes Yes
Sports mode with live score panel — Yes
Sport-specific breakdown editors — Yes
Scoreboard module — Yes
LiveBlogPosting structured data — Yes
Sponsor slots with click tracking — Yes
Token-authenticated write API — Yes
Per-feed permissions and approval workflow — Yes
Sound alerts — Yes
Live viewer count — Yes
Per-feed theme overrides — Yes
Support Documentation Priority email

The free edition is perpetual, not a trial. Nothing expires and no feature is time-limited. Everything you write stays published whichever edition you run.

Live coverage

Scores and entries update via a lightweight AJAX polling mechanism. A file-based micro-cache collapses requests so the server is queried once per interval per feed, regardless of how many people are watching. When a new entry is posted, readers see a notification bar and optionally hear a chime, and the feed brings in new content without a page reload.

Sport-specific scoring

Every supported format has a purpose-built score editor in the Joomla admin.

Rugby — tracks tries, penalty tries, conversions, penalties and drop goals, computing the headline score automatically
Tennis — derives the set count from completed sets only, so a 5–3 in-progress set doesn't wrongly advance the scoreline
American football — sums quarters
Ice hockey and similar — sums periods
Baseball — sums innings
Cricket — the innings breakdown is the score; the headline figure is replaced with match result text
Football and simple formats — score entered directly, as there's no breakdown to derive it from
Search visibility

Pro emits schema.org LiveBlogPosting structured data, which is how Google identifies a page as live coverage and can show the LIVE label in Top Stories. Coverage start and end times are handled automatically — when you mark a match full-time or close a news feed, the markup stops advertising the page as ongoing.

Sponsorship

Pro adds sponsor slots you control: logo, message and link, placed beside the score, in the feed at an interval you set, or both. Impressions and clicks are counted so you can show a sponsor what their matchday coverage delivered.

For a club, that turns the extension into a revenue line rather than a cost.

Multiple contributors

Pro supports several people posting to the same feed at once, with per-feed Joomla permissions. Grant a volunteer rights to update the score without giving them the rest of the feed configuration, or let contributors submit entries that an editor approves before they appear.

Feeds are individual Joomla assets, so permissions can differ between, say, your men's and women's team coverage.

Posting from outside the admin

Pro includes a token-authenticated write API for posting entries, updating scores and closing coverage from outside the Joomla administrator. Tokens are scoped to a single feed, revocable, and rate-limited. Idempotency keys mean a retry over a poor connection can't double-post the same update.

Accessibility

The feed is a proper ARIA live region, so screen readers announce new entries without re-reading the page. Polling never steals keyboard focus, the sound alert has a user control that remembers its setting, and default colours meet WCAG 2.2 AA contrast.

Theming

All output is themeable via CSS custom properties. Typography, colours, overlay opacity and logo dimensions are configurable from the component and module parameters without touching code. Per-feed overrides are a Pro feature.

Requirements

Joomla 5.0 or later, Joomla 6 compatible. PHP 8.1 or later. No additional libraries, CDN dependencies or third-party accounts. Standard Joomla MVC conventions throughout.

Technical notes

Polling, not WebSockets. Updates reach readers on the next poll rather than instantaneously. The default interval is 30 seconds, reducible to 10 on Pro.

Capacity. In testing, a single feed comfortably serves several hundred simultaneous visitors on standard cPanel shared hosting. For sustained audiences of 1,000 or more concurrent per feed, a VPS with OPcache is recommended.

No external data feeds. All match data is entered by an administrator or editorial team. There's no ingestion from commercial score providers.

Companion app. An iOS/Android app for posting from the touchline is under consideration, subject to demand.

Languages

English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese, Dutch, Arabic, Turkish.