Background
This web site chronicles the development of the wp-SwimTeam WordPress plugin. I started developing this plugin when I was unable to find a suitable solution for managing our neighborhood swim team.
The plugin is developed in PHP and is dependent on the phpHtmlLib library. I have been using the phpHtmlLib library for a number of years on various projects and at this point, can’t imagine developing without it. It greatly simplifies the development of PHP generated pages, has a robust and flexible forms processing engine, and provides a collection of widgets to display data nicely. Because WordPress is based on PHP4, I continue to use the 2.x thread of phpHtmlLib. Walt Boring has allowed me to continue the development of the 2.x thread so I add enhancements to it and fix bugs from time to time.
The goal of this plugin is not to replace a piece of software like Hy-Tek’s Team Manager but instead work in conjunction with it. I want to leverage the end user and have them enter as much data as possible and then import it into Hy-Tek Team Manager and Meet Manager, WinSwim, or Easy Ware’s Easy Meet Manager and Easy Team Manager. My goals is to minimize data entry and duplication and eliminate paper. I would like to build a system which is not dependent on other online services where the look and feel of the data being presented to the user is inconsistent with the team’s primary web site. I would like to build a system which is easy to use for novice computer users.
I decided to start with WordPress because it does (or has plugins available) to do much of what we need – post news, post pages of static information, allow multiple contributors, etc. I figured it shouldn’t be too much work to extend WordPress with a plugin to take care of the Swim Team specific stuff.
There are TONS of people that seem to share this frustration with Hy-Tek on the data entry side. I think the merger with Active has just made it worse. They want to be the “everything” for all team sports. As we know, those “software silos” only last so long in this day and age before somebody without any legacy comes in and uses new more effecient tools and whips butt and starts a ground swell in the trenches.
All I want to do is get a flipping registration dataset spreadsheet into Team Mgr that I collected from using formstack forms for our online summer swim team registration process.
Great to share the frustration with you!
Hi,
I have also been looking at ways to import data into team manager and have run into similar frustrations as yourself. As you say it is a very closed environment Hytek has adopted. I have managed to extract and present data onto our club website through some extracts and data manipulation (you will see this in the tools -> club database menu). However importing data is a very different proposition (eg meet entries). I have opened one of the entries files which appear to have a very complex data structure which contains significantly more information than it needs to.
Happy to correspond more if we can assist each other.
I am more than happy to collaborate. I’ve been looking at the .HY3 file lately in an effort to figure it out. Some of it is SDIF and some of it is Hy-tek specific but the checksum at the end of each line in the file is the big unknown. What sort of data are you looking to import? The biggest challenge I face is getting Meet Manager to read heat and lane information as pre-setting it is a function of how we run dual swim meets for summer swim league.
We aren’t trying to interface during meets. We are attempting to allow the club members to enter meets online. To simplify this we want to upload a meet events file (which we get from the meet organiser) and then download the meet entries and load these into Team manager where they are validated before being sent to the meet organiser. We will validate age and gender online but not entry times.
Based on a quick look at the event and entry files they appear to be Hy-tek format fixed field length. Some of the fields are obvious but others are a complete mystery. I haven’t checked if there is a checksum.