Futures
Like any software solution, wp-SwimTeam has some holes which need to be filled. Below is the list of features, in no particular order, which will be added prior to the summer 2009 swim season. Yes, that is almost a year away but I do not want to be doing development during the season next year so I expect that most of these will be implemented in the next 3-4 months.
- Scratch / Registration for meets (aka opt-in / opt-out) Complete
- Define and Manage Volunteer Roles Complete
- Volunteer sign up Complete
- Pool and Team Records
- Import Times and per swimmer historical time records
- Heat Sheet Management
- Export SDIF Entries for Swim Meet
- Import Events from .hyv or .ev3 files
- SDIF manipulation utilities
- Additional Reporting
Of these, the Heat Sheet Management is probably the hardest because I want to implement an AJAX based drag and drop solution. Developing a heat sheet is non-trivial because it needs to account for scratches and prior times, and late additions and deletions. I suspect this will be the last feature from this list that will be implemented because it depends on several of the others and because I haven’t done any work with AJAX yet.
The ability to export entries for a meet based on the active roster and the state of the scratch (opt-in / opt-out) list is something I expect to add soon as it (a) should be pretty easy and (b) would help me quite a bit with the MacDolphins and the large number of scratches we have each week. The ability to import Event Files from Hy-tek would also be really useful since they are pretty easy to come by.
I could spend a lot of time on reporting and probably need to do so. Some of the initial reporting I implemented really needs to be redone and all of the reports need the ability to be exported as CSV so they can be manipulated in Excel. Updating the reporting module is something that is unlikely to happen soon though.
I like the addition of varying fee values based on age groups, since I suspect many neighborhood clubs do the same thing to encourage older swimmers. One other feature that may also be useful is to allow an option to set a maximum fee value on a per-family (user) basis. I know our club has such a limit so as not to over burden families with multiple swimmers.
Any testing/statement on trying out Wordpress 3.0?
I did some testing with a 3.0 beta a while back and didn’t run into any problems but I didn’t test very much either. I found a couple minor things that I had to fix due to the error checking 3.0 does which required an update to the phpHtmlLib library.
With two weeks left to go in the season, I am not going to update our site until the season is over.
I’ve had a request from our Volunteer Coordinator to add another fields to the Jobs module so I’ll probably do that in the next day or two but for now, now immediate plans to do any extensive testing on WP 3.0. I will do it, but probably not before the season is over.