Since I am into the second season of using wp-SwimTeam for the MacDolphins I am running into families who swam last year who don’t plan on swimming this year. When I started building wp-SwimTeam I made the decision that I didn’t want to delete swimmers or families so pool records and a history could be kept easily.
The wp-SwimTeam plugin handles inactive swimmers and families just fine however the E-mail Users plugin we’re using to contact our swim families doesn’t know anything about active or inactive families so people who aren’t interested any more are getting copies of e-mail they shouldn’t really receive. Most ignore them but some don’t want to be bothered. I don’t want to build an e-mail system into wp-SwimTeam, there are plugins that already do that. I am not really interested in building a custom role manager either but that might be the solution. By default I have all users as subscribers now, I could also look into assigning inactive users to have “no role on this blog” and see if that prevents them from receiving e-mail.
Development, Swim Team
active, e-mail, inactive, MacDolphins, role manager, users, wp-SwimTeam
I have been asked to present the experiences of the MacGregor Downs MacDolphins with WinSwim and our team web site at the March board meeting of the Tarheel Swimming Association (TSA).
Our experience with Hy-Tek and ultimately WinSwim were significant drivers in the development of the wp-SwimTeam plugin. I have made the presentation available for download.
Development, News, Swim Team
Hy-Tek, MacDolphins, TSA, WinSwim
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.
Development, Swim Team
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.
Development, Progress, Swim Team
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.
Development, Progress, Swim Team
