It will be summer swim team season before I know it so it is time to start gearing up for the upcoming season. I haven’t really looked at wp-SwimTeam since last fall and WordPress has had several updates since then. I found out today that one of the updates causes the “real name” for the users not to be returned so that is first on my list of things to fix. There are also some GUI inconsistencies that I’d like to fix.
This is my short list of items which I want to implement this season:
- New/update Swim Team theme. This really isn’t related to wp-SwimTeam per se but our site is looking a little dated and it is time to freshen it up.
- Results Import: I said I was going to do this last season and I never finished it. I really want to get this done this year.
- Export of Meet Entries: The wp-SwimTeam plugin has all of the informtation (roster, scratch list, event list, etc.) to generate a Meet Entries file in SDIF format. Providing this file will greatly simplify getting a team’s entries into either Hy-tek or WinSwim (or any other tool which imports meet entries). This will likely be first on my list after fixing the name bug and the GUI inconsistencies.
- Document all of the short codes on the wp-SwimTeam demo site. I really need to do this. It would make it much easier for new people to pick up the plugin and do something useful with it quickly.
The simple answer is: I don’t know. Usually I try to at least smoke test wp-SwimTeam before a new release of WordPress goes out but I haven’t gotten to it yet for 3.2. We’ve had two swim meets in a row postponed due to weather which means all of the pre-work has to be done twice. Bleh. Tonight’s forecast doesn’t look much better either. I will try and run some tests before the end of the week but for now I recommend staying on 3.1.4.
WordPress 3.2 beta is out for testing and with it comes several requirements. The two notable requirements are PHP 5.2.14 or newer and MySQL 5.0 or newer. I will likely move to 3.2 for wp-SwimTeam development once it is released and I’ve done some testing with it. I’ve been running under PHP5 (5.2.14 and 5.3.x) for a while now so I don’t see this as an issue but it might be for people running on older web hosts.
WordPress has a nice built in feature to update plugins when there is a new version available. Because wp-SwimTeam isn’t hosted in the official WordPress plugin repository, I haven’t been able to take advantage of this feature.
I have set up projects in the official WordPress plugin repository for both wp-SwimTeam and phpHtmlLib. I am working on a process where the plugin updater will work by adding the code into the WordPress repository when Iam ready to release it.
Currently the version of the code in the WordPress repository is the same as what is available for download although the version number reported is wrong (1.0.553 vs 1.2.553). The “553″ is the critical part of the release number because it represents the Subversion commit number (build number) that the release is based on.
If you see a “plugin out of date” message within the WordPress Dashboard, it is because I am working on this process. The latest and greatest release will likely be available first as a download on this site but when I reach what I consider a “stable” release, I will also make it available through the WordPress plugin repository. Stay tuned as this flushes out.
I’ve been working on wp-SwimTeam over the past couple days and fixed a lot of minor issues and a couple of bigger ones and one critical one in phpHtmlLib. The change in phpHtmlLib is absolutely required to support WordPress 3.0 and later so it will be necessary to update the phpHtmlLib plugin in addition to the latest update.
This upcoming release of wp-SwimTeam is ONLY being tested against WordPress 3.0.x (3.0.4 in my case). It may work fine with 2.9.x but I do not plan to test it. This upcoming release also tweaks the database, dropping columns that are no longer used. This is primarily an issue with the Users and Swimmers table where there were some remnants left from the previous implementation of optional fields. Make sure you backup your database prior to installing!
The release should be available in the next day or two.
I apologize for how slow this web site has been lately. I don’t visit it myself too often when I am not actively working on wp-SwimTeam so I was somewhat oblivious to it. My sites are hosted with GoDaddy and I’ve never really had an issue with their shared hosting service. It is cheap, easy to administer, and for the low volume traffic I tend to get, more than adequate.
I called GoDaddy this morning to see why my sites was loading so slowly – I am seeing page load times of 30-40 seconds which is just plain silly. It looks like another web site that I happen to be sharing the “shared” server with is consuming all of the resources. GoDaddy is going to monitor it and see what is up. I expect it will remain slow for at least a few days. Hopefully they’ll figure out what it is and do something about it but they did tell me that if the other site isn’t violating their TOS, there isn’t much I can do about it. They also suggested I look into a WordPress caching plugin. I don’t have near the volume of data nor traffic to warrant a caching plugin but if the situation persists, I’ll look into it.
Bleh. Even on a shared server there ought to be some expectation of “reasonable” performance. I will continue to monitor the performance and see what I can do about it.
I’ve had a request from my team, the MacDolphins, to be able to send e-mail to the parents of specific age groups. We do a number of activities that are limited to older kids or only for a specific age group so I’ve been aware of this need for a while. Unfortunately I don’t have an easy way to solve it.
I think the WordPress Roles and Capabilities functionality may be the answer to my problem. I could create a role for each age group and assign the users that have a swimmer in that age group to the appropriate roles. By doing this, I think I can continue to use the Email Users plugin to contact specific groups of users based on the roles defined.
I need to do more research on Roles and Capabilities. I’ve played with a couple plugins and they aren’t real straight forward.
If you are looking for a swim team theme for your WordPress site, take a look at my Sandbox Swim Team theme. This is the theme I use for the wp-Swim Team Demo site as well as the MacDolphins site.
Sandbox Swim Team is a fluid layout which has several color schemes to choose from, supports custom headers, has a facility to modify the header with CSS and is widget ready. You can find Sandbox Swim Team with some other WordPress stuff I have done on my catch all site.
WordPress 3.0 is expected to be out sometime in May. I figured I ought to do some basic testing to see if changes to WordPress would have any significant impact on wp-SwimTeam.
I have a Linux Virtual Machine which I have set up such that I can always run the bleeding edge of WordPress – right out of the Subversion repository. When a new version of WordPress is ready to come out I update my Linux VM with the current state of WordPress and the current state of wp-SwimTeam and run some tests.
I started doing this a couple weeks ago and got busy and never finished it. This morning, I got back to it. It turns out, it didn’t run very well. Both wp-SwimTeam and phpHtmlLib plugins were calling deprecated WordPress functions. In releases prior to 3.0, there were no warnings about calling a deprecated function but 3.0 has a new warning feature. The way it is implemented, the warnings actually caused a failure with phpHtmlLib which resulted in WordPress not successfully loading.
I have fixed the problems in both plugins and committed the changes. However, I have not released new builds yet so until I do, I advise sticking with the 2.9.x release of WordPress. I expect a new build later this week at the latest.
This evening I installed the Simple:Press forum plugin. This forum should be used for questions, bug reports, and anything else related to wp-SwimTeam. I will try and add some information on installing and configuring wp-SwimTeam soon but I am also considering adding a Wiki for documentation. Click on the Forum tab along the top of the page to access the forum.
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