wp-SwimTeam

I have not done much work on wp-SwimTeam over the past few months but about a week ago I dusted off my virtual machine (have I ever mentioned how much I love VMware Workstation?) in preparation for the upcoming season.  Since I last worked on the project there have been numerous patches for Windows XP (my development area is an XP VM) and WordPress has moved from 2.7 through the 2.8.x releases and is now on 2.9.1.

All new work will be done against 2.9.1 (for now) so I have upgraded WordPress and the plugins that I use in conjunction with wp-SwimTeam.  There are two areas where I will focus on immediately – importing results which I never finished last year and volunteer management.  I’ll probably finish the portion of results I am working on right now and then move on to volunteer management since we’ll need that functionality in March when the MacDolphins do registration.

News, Progress, WordPress registration, results, VMware, volunteers

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.

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.

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

This evening I uploaded a new version of wp-SwimTeam.  It is available on the download page.  This version introduces a new report for swim meets.  The Swim Meet report’s most important feature is the listing of swimmers who have Opted-In or Opted-Out of a swim meet.  On the MacDolphins we call this a the Scratch List.

A parent can now indicate when their swimmers are participating (for meets defined as opt-in) or not participating (for meets defined as opt-out) on either a full meet or event basis.  The meet report will display a summary of swimmer participation based on the type of meet.

A couple of the options on the Report Form are disabled because they aren’t functional yet.  They will probably work in a day or two.

This release also introduces a new mode for Swimmer Labels – Frozen.  When Swimmer Labels are unlocked, they can be bulk assigned.  When they are locked, Swimmer Labels can be edited on a per swimmer basis but no bulk assigned.  When they are frozen, they can’t be edited at all.  I added this because I inadvertently reassigned the swimmer labels for the MacDolphins yesterday without meaning to.  Whoops.

I fixed a few other minor issues as well but nothing significant, mostly presentation of forms and such.

Development, Progress, Release, Software, download download, opt-in, opt-out, Release, Report Generator, wp-SwimTeam

I had a request to support fields that weren’t visible to the end users when they used the system.  I decided to support these “administrative” fields as I have been referring to them by enhancing the optional fields for swimmers and users to be tagged as “user” fields or “administrative” fields.

When a field is defined as “administrative”, only users with WordPress permissions of EDITOR or higher will have the fields visible.  For all other users, they are hidden.  An Admin or Editor can change the value of the field and it will be saved when the user or swimmer data is saved.

The first practical usage of this is with a team that wants to mark registration fees as paid on a per swimmer basis.  Not the sort of thing you would expose to a parent but useful from a logistics perspective.

Both user and administrative fields are available in reports.

Development, Ideas, News, Progress admin, fees, fields, Options, registration

In the build I posted yesterday there were a couple of bugs which prevented the auto-registration feature to work when a swimmer is added.  There was also a bug in the age verification which allowed swimmers outside of the age range to added to the system and then registered for the active season.

If you download v0.1.375 yesterday, you will want to download v0.1.376 and update the plugin.

Bugs, Development, Progress, Release, download Bug, download, registration, wp-SwimTeam

This morning I uploaded v0.1.357 of the wp-SwimTeam plugin.  You can download it from the download page.  Note the bump of the minor version number from 0 to 1 in this build.

This build completes the changes to the option model for the optional fields for users and swimmers.  In prior builds the optional fields were hard coded at 5 for both swimmers and users and the data was stored as part of the user and swimmer records.  This build allows an administrator to set the number of optional fields for users and swimmers (independently) and offers several new types of optional fields (required and optional URLs and e-mail addresses) and stores optional data in a separate table.

The extent of this change was pretty extensive which is why there hasn’t been a release in almost a month.  Unfortunately the old option data is not migrated to the new table so if you are using optional fields, you may have to re-enter some data.  I had to do this with my own swim team.  It is a nuisance.  The old data is still in the database in the users and swimmers table but not accessed.

This build also fixes numerous GUI nits with messages and guidance, it should all be consistent now although I am sure I have missed something.  It also fixes a bug with age groups when swimmer label prefixes are not being used.

I strongly recommend backing up your database before installing this update!

Progress, Release, download database, Options, Release, wp-SwimTeam

This afternoon I finished updating the Report Generator so it completely supports the new option model.  Both CSV and HTML reports are working.  Filtering works too but right now only YES-NO optional fields are available as filters.  I am not sure if I will change that or not.

I need to run through some additional testing and then I’ll post a release.  This is enough of a change that I’ll probably bump the revision from 0.0.x to 0.1.x for both the software and database version.

Development, Ideas, Progress CSV, HTML, Report Generator

I haven’t posted much for the last couple weeks – I have been very busy at work including a very short notice trip to Stockholm.  I have not had as much time to work on wp-SwimTeam as I had hoped I’d have.  Usually I can get a lot done on the flight home from Europe but not this time.  I had to fly Continental and the plane was packed – not real conducive to getting work done.

Anyway, I am back and have been working on re-implementing how I had handled the optional fields for users and swimmers.  It has always bothered me that I had hard coded five (5) optional fields in – I knew it was wrong but never bothered to work out a better solution.  Before I left for Sweden I implemented a new model which is loosely based on how WordPress handles user meta data.

I had completed the work on the user and swimmer profile aspect of the new option model but the Report Generator was broken as was the ability to export users and swimmers in CSV format.  It turns  out fixing the Report Generator was more involved than I thought it would be but I now have the User portion of it completed and committed to SVN.  Doing the swimmer report should be pretty straight forward, I can reuse most of the code.  The hard part is done, to do it for swimmers is pretty simple.

So what is the downside?  I haven’t figured out a good way to migrate any information currently stored in the old option fields to the new model.  For our swim team I think I am just going to manually re-enter since we have decided to eliminate one of the fields anyway.

On the upside, the new option models allows the site administrator to configure an arbitrary number of extra fields and fields can now be defined as URL, E-mail, Text, Clothing Size, or Yes-No fields.

Development, Progress, SVN Options, wp-SwimTeam

This afternoon I posted a new version of the wp-SwimTeam plugin to the download page.  This update adds new functionality to the swimmer registration process.  There is also the initial stages of registration fees.  You can define what the registration fee is globally and then override it at the age group level.  There is no support currently for a family discount.

New

If your team has Terms of Use (aka Rules and Regulations) and/or Billing information posted on your web site, you can add the URL(s) to the Registration Options and the link(s) will be displayed on the Registration Form and the user will be required to acknowledge the information via a Check Box.  The MacDolphins needed this for billing purposes.

The other new feature is the addition of e-mail confirmation of registration (and unregistration).  The person performing the action is sent an e-mail as is the list of e-mail addresses set up on the Registration Options tab.

Bug Fixes

A couple of minor form layout items were fixed in this build, nothing of major significance.

Progress, Release, download download, Release, wp-SwimTeam