wp-SwimTeam

As I work on results functionality I have several ideas floating around my head.  One is the ability to chart swimmer results over the course of a season or possibly several seasons.  Charting over several seasons raises some issues (e.g. different age groups, event distances, etc.) but charting results for at least one season would be interesting.

I had thought about using the same functionality that the WordPress.com Stats plugin uses which is Open Flash Chart to plot results.  Today while looking for something else, I may have found something which is a better solution:  pChart – a PHP library for building charts!

Hopefully I will get to try it out in the next few weeks.  I have been sidetracked by a WordPress project for my daughter’s soccer team so Swim Team will have wait a little longer.

Mike Walsh Development, Ideas, Progress pChart, results

I haven’t posted much but I have been working on wp-SwimTeam off and on now that the MacDolphins summer season is over.  I haven’t released anything yet but I’ve made some significant improvements. 

Opt-In/Opt-Out

Improvements have been made to the Opt-In/Opt-Out process to make it much less confusing.  The Opt-In/Opt-Out form is now smarter, only presenting the list of strokes to the user when a Partial Opt-In/Opt-Out is selected.  The ability to Opt-In/Opt-Out has also been added to the “My Swimmers” tab to make it easier to find.

Login Redirect

I’ve also added a new option to control what happens when end users login to a site running wp-SwimTeam.  For most users, landing on the WordPress Dashboard page is confusing.  They don’t care about 99% of the stuff presented to them nor should they.  The plugin now allows definition of a login redirect so the user can be sent to either the home page or the Swim Team Overview (which is what I expect to use most of the time) page.  Landing on the Swim Team Overview page makes the most sense for most users since when they login, they are most likely doing some level of interaction with the swim team functionality.

Results Import

Results import is still  in progress, the other two areas mentioned above are complete.  At this point importing results does little more than perform a first pass validation that the supplied file is indeed a SDIF results file.  Now that I have the uploading and validation complete, I need to work on the data model to store results.  Results will be connected to swimmers and meets and events.  Since a new table will be created, results will change the database version when it is released.

Initially I expect to simply report results from a meet and be able to look at results for any given swimmer.  Longer term I want to use Open Flash Chart to plot results on a per swimmer basis over the course of a season or possibly several seasons.  I don’t expect to get to this until much later this year though.

WordPress 2.8.x

I am still working with WordPress 2.7.1 in my development environment.  I haven’t even tried 2.8.4 yet so I have no idea what the impact is.  I will likely do so once I am done with the results.

Mike Walsh Development, News, Progress opt-in, opt-out, Options, results, WordPress

I posted wp-SwimTeam v0.1.418 late tonight to the download page.  This update fixes a minor problem with SDIF generation of the roster.  In certain instances the first name field would be empty.

Mike Walsh Development, Release, SDIF download, Release, SDIF, wp-SwimTeam

When our coaching staff constructed their heat sheet by hand they always wrote it up as a matrix with the heats on the vertical axis and the lanes on the horizontal axis.  This style of heat sheet matches the layout of the pool and the way the kids line up as they get ready to swim.

Now that we are doing all of our seeding using WinSwim, we no longer have the matrix style heat sheet and many of our parents have asked if we can get the heat sheet in that format.

After playing around with Crystal Reports for a while I concluded that it would easier to develop an Excel workbook to construct the heat sheet than it would be to get Crystal Reports to do it.  I am sure CR can do it but I don’t know how and I needed something this season!

The Excel workbook I developed consumes the output of the Custom Report Meet Heat Sheet by Event (CSV) that I developed and posted previously (make sure you download the update as I changed the report recently).

The workbook requires Excel 2007 to run.  It will actually run in Excel 2003 if you load the Office 2007 compatibility pack for Office 2003 however the sorting functions are disabled so you’ll have to do your own sorting.

There are some controls over the width and height of the cells that comprise the heat sheet and page breaks will be inserted after every three events.  They can be adjusted using Excel’s standard page break functionality.

Download a sample heat sheet which was generated with Heat Sheet Builder.

Download the collection of Custom Reports for WinSwim.

This Excel workbook is free to download – there is sample data included in it, before using it I would suggest looking at the Heat Sheet CSV tab to see the format of the data once it is imported from the CSV file.

Mike Walsh Crystal Reports, Release, WinSwim, download Crystal Reports, download, Heat Sheet, WinSwim

I posted wp-SwimTeam v0.1.417 this afternoon to the download page.  This update adds new functionality and fixes a few minor things which have bothered me as I found them during the season.

The big new feature is a new shortcode – wpst_meet_report.  This shortcode allows a the contents of a meet report to appear in a post or a page like this example on the wp-SwimTeam demo site.

The reports also now support hiding first and last names by only showing the initial as well as the ability to override the first name with a nickname if the swimmer’s profile has one.  The missing ability to display a map on the swim meet report has been added so the checkbox on the form is now enabled.  The reports can now display opt-in and opt-out information chronologically in the order they were added to the system as well as the previously available by name and by swimmer label.

Mike Walsh Development, Google Maps, News, Release download, Google Maps, Release, Report Generator

We use WinSwim to manage and run swim meets for the MacDolphins and now that our season has started, I have been doing a lot of work with WinSwim and not too much with wp-SwimTeam.  There are some things I need to fix but right now nothing is broken.

A year ago when I started using WinSwim I ended up creating a slew of custom reports mostly to deal with the fact that our pool is one of the few in the area which is a 25 meter pool – most are 25 yards.  We needed times in both meters and yards and the reports which came with WinSwim didn’t really handle it.  So I created a bunch of my own.  The only real downside of using custom reports is it required a file that is installed with WinSwim (language.xml) to be modified.  This was a maintenance headache as it would be overwritten with each WinSwim update.

WinSwim 4.0.21 introduced a new model for custom reports which removes the need to modify the language.xml file (yeah!).  Now each report is paired with a corresponding XML file and they all reside in a directory called “custom” within the WinSwim installation tree.

The reports are mostly geared around Heat Sheets and end of year reports.  To use the new reports, download the ZIP file and unzip into your top level WinSwim installation directory. 

For example. in my case, I have WinSwim installed like this:

When the reports are installed correctly you will have a new “Custom” menu available in the Report Viewer as a new top level menu item to the right of “Reports”.  Note that the old “Custom” menu under the “Reports” but will still be there and will likely be empty unless you are using the old style of custom reports (which is still supported).

Mike Walsh Crystal Reports, Development, Ideas, WinSwim, download Crystal Reports, WinSwim

This evening I posted a new build of wp-SwimTeam to the downloads page.  This version fixes an unusual situation where the swimmer reports would fail to work when no optional swimmer fields we defined.

I also fixed another issue with optional fields (user and swimmer) where if the number of fields in use was set to 0 in the Options settings, the system would revert to the default (5) number of fields.

Over the past week or so I have also posted a couple updates without posting an announcement.  Most of the improvements were in the reporting and SDIF generation.  Reports for Swim Meets can now include multiple meets on the same report and the SDIF options page has a new option to allow overriding the first name with the nickname when exporting the roster in SDIF format.

Mike Walsh Development, Release, download download, Release, Report Generator, SDIF

A quick update that fixes exactly one issue – v0.1.400 is now on the download page.  I unleashed the opt-in/opt-out system on the MacDolphins today and quickly found that having the Participation column with “Register” and “Scratch” displayed for the users was confusing as parents thought that the Register or Scratch wording indicated the statue of their swimmers.  For now I have removed the column and I will add the ability for parents to see a summary of their Registers and Scratches.

Mike Walsh Development, Release, Software, download download, opt-in, opt-out, Release

I just uploaded a new version of wp-SwimTeam.  It is now available on the download page.  This version fixes some issues with the Opt-In/Opt-Out functionality and fixes a pretty significant issue with User Option fields not being initialized correctly.

This build also restores the missing CSS references so any information generated by the short codes is displayed properly.

Mike Walsh Development, Release, download download, opt-in, opt-out, Release

This morning I uploaded a new version of wp-SwimTeam.  It is available on the download page.  This version fixes a minor bug that somehow I overlooked.  The bug manifested as a PHP syntax error on the Reports menu.  No other changes are included in this build.

Mike Walsh Release, download Bug, download, Release, wp-SwimTeam