It has been about two weeks which our swim team, the MacDolphins, has been using wp-SwimTeam in conjunction with WordPress for swim team registration. This has been a pretty good testing experience and for the most part, has goine pretty smoothly.
However, some things which seem obvious to me apparently aren’t so obvious so I will need to rethink those. For example – when adding a swimmer, the swimmer should be registered for the current season by default as part of the registration process as opposed to making it a separate step. I also need to add some birth date checking as we had a number of swimmers registered with the current date (the default) which means they were born on the day they were registered.
I also ran into a problem where anyone using Apple’s Safari web browser (either on a Mac or a PC) wasn’t able to do much because the Javascript behavior of any of the buttons on the GUIDataList objects (a nice spreadhseet like widget used extensively to present information to the users) was different than Internet Explorer or Firefox. It was very odd and took a while to chase down but it is fixed so now Mac users are happy too!
The next thing I am working on is Swimmer numbers for swim meets. In our area, each swimmer is labeled (usually on their arm or leg with a Sharpie) with their swimmer number. Some teams number their swimmers sequentially, other clubs, like ours, give each age group a prefix and number the swimmers within the age group. E.g. the 7-8 girls are numbered 801 – 8xx and the 7-8 boys are numbered 701-7xx. We will need this capability in the next 2-3 weeks so it is bubbling up the list. I also need to generate some reports so that is a priority as well.
I went ahead and upgraded WordPress to 2.5.1 even though I don’t like the new Dashboard. It turns out I wanted to use the Email Users plugin with the MacDolphins site and since Email Users needed 2.5, I had to upgrade the MacDolphins site in order to use it. Since the Swim Team plugin exposes the Dashboard pretty extensively to the end user, I decided to see if I could modify the Dashboard so it was more to my liking.
The result of that work is Retro-Dashboard, a WordPress Admin Theme plugin which I released yesterday. It isn’t anything super fancy but it is waaaaaaay better than the default Dashboard (bleh, who thought that was a good idea).
The 2.5 WordPress release has been out for a few weeks but, I haven’t paid too much attention to it as I was focusing on getting the plugin sufficiently complete to support our Swim Team registation last weekend.
Today I uploaded 2.5 into my development area. Yuch. I really don’t like the color schemes at all nor do I like the “all the way to the edge of the browser” design. I am not sure what to do now – the new interface really clashes with the work I have done on the plugin. I guess it was inevitable but I don’t really feel like dealing wiht it right now.
If I can make some simple CSS changes, that may be ok, otherwise I’ll probably stick with 2.3.3 until after this season is over.
Last Sunday we had our Swim Team open house and registration. It was the first serious test of the work I have done by someone other than myself. At work we have 8 laptops in a rolling case we use for workshops and training so I brought them home and set them up for people to use – I would have 8 people registering simultaneously. Because most people wouldn’t have access to their e-mail, I had them visit me first where I assigned them a username and password. They then logged in and registered themselves and their swimmers. Everything went pretty well for the most part. Except for one minor glitch.
I had a very late request (like an hour before registration) to capture one more field so I adjusted the data model, changed the form and tested everything. Since the data model changed I needed to deactivate and re-activate the plugin for the tables to update. Worked great in my development area but I forgot to deactivate and re-activate on the live server. Oops. People were getting database errors when they tried to update their contact information. Great.
Fortunate, the important part, the actual swimmer registration was unaffected so I had people skip their address and only worry about their swimmers. This worked fine and we registered almost 100 swimmers in about two hours. I knew if I had 5 quiet minutes to look at it, I would know what was wrong. Sure enough, once open house ended andI could look at it, I immediately saw what the problem was. Duh.
Now I need to ping every registered parent to update their contact information.
Last night I enhanced the swimmer data model so additional information can be captured. The swimmer record now support five (5) optional fields which are under the control of the site admin. This is similar functionality to what the user profile provides. Both the User profile and Swimmer profile optional fields hve been enhanced to support required, optional, and yes-no fields.
I also made a bunch of other minor tweaks to various things as I get ready for Swim Team registration on the 13th. Our team registration will be the smoke test of the system.
The Swim Team Overview, the first page the plugin presents to end users, has been updated to do something useful. It previously had some placeholder text on it. Now it reports the active season and the number of active swimmers per age group.
Yesterday I completed the first pass of exporting a LSC Registration Pyramid SDIF file. Since I only have the demo versions of the Hy-Tek tools (Team Manager and Meet Manager), I sent the SDIF file to the support contact I have been working with at Hy-Tek. Meet Manager can’t read the file which makes sense because it contains roster information, not meet entries. Team Manager can’t read it either because it doesn’t import SDIF. Great. It turns out Hy-Tek really only supports a subset of SDIF. Now what do I do?
When I first started looking into this problem, I found a couple other similar applications which manage swim team rosters and meets. One was from EasyWare, the other from WinSwim. I tried to import the data into WinSwim and didn’t have much luck. I then sent the file to their support e-mail address and hoped I had simply made a mistake in my SDIF file. I got a nice reply stating that WinSwim didn’t support the LSC Registation Pyramid and suggested I structure my file a little differently OR use their ASCII import method.
The ASCII import method didn’t look too difficult but instead of tackling it last night, I played Rock Band with my son. I am really glad I played Rock Band instead of working ont he plugin! This morning I woke up to an e-mail asking me to download and try a new version of WinSwim which support the LSC registration pyramid. Yeah! I installed it and imported my sample data without any issues. How cool is that? Unless I run into a problem, I expect our team will make an investment in WinSwim instead of Hy-Tek.
Today I finished the first pass on generating an SDIF file for the roster. I sent it to Hy-Tek and it doesn’t import. Great. Apparently they don’t seem to support all of the SDIF specification, just some of it. No mention of that anywhere on their web site.
On the plus side, I found a better version of the SDIF specification on the WinSwim web site. If I can get WinSwim to digest the SDIF file I generated, I may push our team to use it.
I have been trading e-mail with a support guy at Hy-Tek regading Team Manager’s ability to import SDIF. After our dialog, I am not sure Team Manager can import the roster I am trying to generate. It can import results but based on the samples Hy-Tek sent me, it isn’t clear if it will deal with the D1 and D2 records or not. Since they won’t send me an evaluation version, only the Lite version which doesn’t support SDIF import, I have to sending them my SDIF file for them to import and see what I get back.
I am also looking at WinSwim which actually looks like a better solution for most club swim teams. WinSwim also offers a really useful SDIF Checker which will help me out greatly. Using the checker, I should be able to send Hy-Tek what I believe is a good SDIF file.
It really boggles my mind that Hy-Tek is the defacto standard when their tool is so hard to use and to get data in and out of. Convincing our team that WinSwim may be a better choice for us will be no small feat.
I haven’t had a lot of time to work on the plugin but got back to it last night and am really trying to get the roster export completed. It isn’t hard but it is tedious as there is lots of data to output in the SDIF format. I am close to being done and found an inconsistency with the D1 record. It allocates 12 characters for the USS# field however the USS# field is 14 characters long. Since it looks like it is only mandatory for submitting data to USS, I may omit it. I also sent an e-mail to Hy-Tek to see how they handle it, we’ll see if they respond. For now I think I will omit it and move on. I need a copy of Team Manager to test with – that is my next dilema.
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