LNC Chessboard

LNC Chessboard is a WordPress plugin made for chess content creators and players.

com and Lichess player stats, using a shortcode or block.

🟢 Available Now: Game Viewer & Analysis

A modern way to present chess games on WordPress. The Game Viewer turns any PGN into a clean, interactive chessboard embedded in your posts and pages. pgn file, and your readers can replay the game move by move on a professional board, right inside your article.

Highlights:

* A modern way to show a chess game — no static diagrams or screenshots. Readers click through the moves, jump to any position, and open it in Lichess analysis.

* New board colours — five ready-made themes (brown, blue, green, grey, and LNC purple), plus custom colours so the board matches your site’s design.

* Multilingual — the viewer, its controls, and the editor screens are translated into German, French, Russian, Polish, Turkish, and Brazilian Portuguese, and switch automatically with your site’s language.

What the Game Viewer does:

* Renders a themed, interactive board from any PGN (five predefined themes — brown, blue, green, grey, and LNC purple — plus a custom option where you pick your own light and dark square colours to match your site).

* Specific positions — showcase a single position instead of a full game: set it up on an interactive board or paste a FEN, then draw arrows and highlight squares to point out ideas.

* Autoplay — a play/pause control (and autoplay / speed options) steps through the game hands-free.

* Clean embeds — optionally hide the move list, the navigation controls, and/or the analysis actions to show just the board, for a lighter look in a post.

* Full replay controls — jump to the start or end, step forward and backward, and click any move in the notation to jump straight to that position.

* Keyboard friendly — use the arrow keys to step through moves and Home/End to jump, with screen-reader announcements of each move.

* Position analysis — open the exact current position in Lichess analysis, copy the position’s FEN, or send the whole game to Lichess with one click.

* Save games once and reuse them anywhere — each saved game gets a simple shortcode and a native block.

Two ways to display a game:

1. Paste PGN directly into the shortcode or block for a one-off game.

2. Save a game under LNC Chessboard → Chess Games, then embed it by id and reuse it across any number of posts and pages. Players, event, date, and result are read automatically from the PGN headers.

Example shortcodes:

[lncchess_game id=”123″]

[lncchess_game pgn=”1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3.

Bb5 a6″ theme=”green” orientation=”black”]

Or add the Chess Game block in the WordPress block editor, pick a saved game or paste PGN, and choose a theme and orientation from the sidebar.

🟢 Available Now: Player Profiles

The Player Profiles module lets you embed always-fresh chess player profiles anywhere on your WordPress site using a simple shortcode. Each profile is fetched live from the platform’s public API, so your visitors always see the most up-to-date ratings, win/loss/draw record, titles, and account details.

Two layouts:

* Stats dashboard (default) — a full player dashboard with charts: win rate (or activity) by time control, ratings by format, a results breakdown, and peak vs current rating, plus summary tiles for peak rating, total games, win rate, FIDE, and more.

* Compact card — the small summary card, ideal for sidebars. Add layout="card" to the shortcode.

com Player Profiles

com. ), bullet/blitz/rapid/daily ratings with their peaks, wins, losses, and draws per time control, tactics and Puzzle Rush scores, follower count, and join date. com Published Data API, which is completely free and requires no API key.

Lichess Player Profiles

Bring Lichess player data into your WordPress pages with the same ease. The Lichess integration displays the player’s title, all time-control ratings (bullet, blitz, rapid, classical, chess960, and more), games played per format, W/L/D record, bio, FIDE rating (if set), online status, playing time, and patron status. The LNC Chessboard Lichess integration uses the official Lichess public API, which is free and open.

How Player Profiles works on your WordPress site:

1. Go to LNC Chessboard → Player Profiles in your WordPress admin.

2. com or Lichess, enter a username, and pick a layout (dashboard or compact card) and a theme (dark or light).

3. Click Preview Card to see exactly how it will look.

4. Copy the generated shortcode and paste it into any WordPress post, page, or widget.

Example shortcodes:

[lncchess_profile source=”chesscom” username=”hikaru”]

[lncchess_profile source=”lichess” username=”DrNykterstein”]

[lncchess_profile source=”lichess” username=”Magnus” theme=”light”]

[lncchess_profile source=”chesscom” username=”hikaru” layout=”card”]

Chess coaches can use Player Profiles to showcase their own credentials on their WordPress coaching site. Chess clubs can display member profiles on their WordPress club page. Tournament organisers can highlight top players ahead of an event.

🌍 Multilingual Support

LNC Chessboard ships with translations for German, French, Russian, Polish, Turkish, and Brazilian Portuguese. Set your site language under Settings → General and the plugin’s admin screens, the Game Viewer, the block editor, and the player dashboards switch automatically. Standard chess terms such as Bullet, Blitz, Rapid, PGN, FEN, and FIDE stay in English, as on most chess sites.

Want LNC Chessboard in your language? org.

Why LNC Chessboard?

Chess is one of the fastest-growing online communities, and WordPress powers over 40% of all websites. Yet until now, chess clubs, coaches, and content creators have had to rely on clunky embeds and disconnected tools to bring chess content into WordPress. LNC Chessboard changes that.

Built by Late Night Chess — a team of chess enthusiasts and WordPress developers — LNC Chessboard is designed from the ground up for the chess community. Every feature is purpose-built for chess use cases: chess club management, chess coaching, chess tournament administration, and chess content creation. No bloat, no irrelevant features — just chess, inside WordPress.

Shortcode Reference

[lncchess_profile] — Display a live player profile dashboard or card.

Attribute

Values

Default

Description

source

chesscom, lichess

chesscom

The platform to fetch the profile from.

username

Any valid username

(required)

The player’s username on the platform.

layout

dashboard, card

dashboard

Full stats dashboard with charts, or the compact card.

theme

dark, light

dark

Visual theme of the profile.

[lncchess_game] — Display an interactive PGN game viewer.

Attribute

Values

Default

Description

id

A saved game’s post ID

(none)

Embed a saved game or position from your library.

pgn

PGN text

(none)

Inline PGN for a replayable game.

fen

A FEN string

(none)

Inline FEN for a single-position diagram.

theme

brown, blue, green, gray, lnc

brown / saved

Board colour theme. Overrides a saved game’s theme.

orientation

white, black

white / saved

Which side is on the bottom of the board.

light-color

g. #ffffff)

(none)

Custom light-square colour. Overrides the theme.

dark-color

g. #9b7fd4)

(none)

Custom dark-square colour. Overrides the theme.

autoplay

true, false

false / saved

Play the game automatically on load.

speed

slow, normal, fast

normal / saved

Autoplay step speed.

show-moves

true, false

true / saved

Show the move notation list (full games).

show-controls

true, false

true / saved

Show the start / prev / play / next / end buttons.

show-analysis

true, false

true / saved

Show the Analyze / Copy FEN / Open-game buttons.

size

g. 360

auto / saved

Board width/height in pixels (square; 200–1200).

Provide id (a saved game or position), pgn (a one-off game), or fen (a one-off position). When embedding by id, the saved theme, orientation, colours, and autoplay settings are used unless you override them. Set both light-color and dark-color to use a custom board colour scheme (this takes precedence over the named theme).

The lnc theme pairs white squares with LNC purple (#9b7fd4).

Example with custom colours and autoplay:

[lncchess_game id=”123″ light-color=”#ffffff” dark-color=”#9b7fd4″ autoplay=”true” speed=”fast”]

Example of a single position diagram:

[lncchess_game fen=”r1bqkbnr/pppp1ppp/2n5/4p3/4P3/5N2/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKB1R w KQkq – 2 3″]

Example of a board with just the replay buttons (no move list):

[lncchess_game id=”123″ show-moves=”false”]

Example with a custom board size:

[lncchess_game id=”123″ size=”320″]

External APIs

LNC Chessboard connects to the following external services to fetch chess player data. These connections are only made when a Player Profile shortcode is present on a page, or when a user previews a profile in the WordPress admin.

1. com Published Data API

com

com/pub/

* Purpose: Fetches public player profile data including username, avatar, title, ratings, win/loss/draw record, country, followers, and join date.

com username entered in the shortcode attribute. No personal data from your WordPress site or its visitors is transmitted.

* Authentication: None required. com Published Data API is fully public.

com/legal/privacy

com/legal/user-agreement

2. Lichess Public API

org)

org/api/

* Purpose: Fetches public player profile data including username, title, ratings across all time controls, win/loss/draw record, bio, FIDE rating, online status, playing time, and patron status.

* Data sent: The Lichess username entered in the shortcode attribute. No personal data from your WordPress site or its visitors is transmitted.

* Authentication: None required. The Lichess public API is free and open.

org/privacy

org/terms-of-service

Caching: All profile API responses are cached on your WordPress server for 5 minutes using WordPress transients. This keeps your chess pages loading fast while ensuring data stays fresh.

3. Lichess Analysis / Import (Game Viewer)

org)

org/import

* Purpose: Optional, user-initiated handoff from the Game Viewer. When a visitor clicks “Analyze this position” or “Open full game on Lichess”, their browser opens Lichess in a new tab with the current FEN or the game’s PGN.

* Data sent: Only the chess position (FEN) or game (PGN) being viewed, and only when the visitor clicks the button. These requests are made by the visitor’s browser, not your WordPress server. No automatic or background requests are made.

org/privacy

org/terms-of-service

Bundled Libraries

LNC Chessboard bundles these open-source JavaScript libraries locally (no external CDN is used at runtime):

• chess.js (BSD-2-Clause) — PGN parsing and chess rules. Loaded only on pages with a game viewer.

• chessground (GPL-3.0-or-later) — the board UI developed for Lichess. Loaded only on pages with a game viewer.

• Chart.js 4.6.1 (MIT) — the charts in the player stats dashboard. Loaded only on pages with a dashboard-layout player profile, and on the Player Profiles admin page for the live preview.

Privacy Policy

LNC Chessboard does not collect, store, or transmit any personal data about your WordPress site’s visitors.

com or Lichess. The only data sent to these external services is the chess username specified in the shortcode — no visitor IP addresses, cookies, or personal information are included in these requests.

Fetched profile data is stored temporarily in your WordPress database as a transient cache for up to 5 minutes, then automatically deleted and refreshed. This data is entirely public information sourced from the respective chess platform’s public API.

com and Lichess handle data, refer to their respective privacy policies linked in the External APIs section above.