wp-SwimTeam

Events for each swim meet is now working.  Even re-ordering also works.  I still need to implement Importing Standard Events but I am pretty sure this will be pretty straight forward.  Hope to have it completed this weekend.  Once done, I will start working on importing meet results.

Saturday morning I had a little time to work on wp-SwimTeam and started working on managing events for a particular swim meet.  As I had noted in another post, the idea is to import a set of standard events and then tweak them.

For the most part I have it working but now it needs some clean up.  The way WordPress loads up pages means you have to monitor the URL if you need to append GET values to control the flow for the user.  I had to work this out when I implemented to tabbed UI and now will have to do something similar for meet events.  Right now the meet id gets appended to the URI and by repeating a set of actions as you modify meet events, it can end up repeated N number of times.  Once I get that worked out, I think I will be ready to import meet results.

I updated one of my development areas to the current bleeding edge version of WordPress 2.7 this morning to see how things look.  Everything with my plugin still seems to work just fine – if you can find it!

I am torn with the new menu structure in the Dashboard.  I like the icons and how much cleaner they are but at the same time, it isn’t obvious where the menus for my plugin should live.  I expect I will have to make a new top level menu and icon.  I am glad the plugin still works but am a little concerned about the way it will integrate with the new WordPress Dashboard UI.

Now that I have the standard events working with drag and drop reordering, I need to propagate events to each meet.  My thinking has been that a meet will start by importing the standard events and then add, delete, edit, and reorder as necessary to support a specific swim meet.

While I have had this model in my head, my first look at actually implementing it raised a bunch of questions – where I do put it?  How does it work?  The event management isn’t as simple as other meet management tasks so it sort of breaks in the way that I implemented the meet data.  I have an idea how to solve it but it will take some experimenting to see if it will work.

It has taken me a little longer (ok, a lot longer) than I had expected but I have drag and drop event ordering working for the default events.  Now that it is working, I need to clean it up and style it.  The jQuery Table DnD plugin I found works great – it does exactly what I need it to do.

After getting the Portlet drag and drop working, or so I thought, it looks like I am going to have to abandon that approach.  It turns out the drag and drop works just find – it does what it is supposed to.  However, getting the new arrangement information so it can be sent back to the server as an Ajax post does not.  I am unable to get any sort of serialization to work and even the Portlet example indicates it is obsolete and references jQuery UI.

I have subsequently found a jQuery based Table Drag-and-Drop solution which looks like it will do what I want.  I am now in the process of implementing this in hopes that it will be a little easier to work with.  Stay tuned …