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.
Ideas, WordPress
capabilities, Ideas, roles
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
sandbox, Themes
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.