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.
I have an initial demo site up and running at http://demo.wp-swimteam.org/. The demo site still has a few issues but I expect to flush those out of the next week or so. If you are interested in this plugin and want to play around with it, feel free to register with the demo site and add some sample swimmers. It will give you a feel for how the end users uses the site.
If you’d like to explore the administration aspect of the plugin, go ahead and register and I will give your User Id the appropriate permissions. The demo site has been populated with a bunch of dummy users and swimmers and a few swim clubs. A sample schedule has been set.
One thing about going through the process, it exposed a few things I failed to include in the GUI redesign! I’ll fix those issues in the next couple days.
I had some time today to work on the plugin and I was able to get a lot of the menu work completed that has been nagging at me. I still have a little more to do though. From the two screen shots below you can see that the icon in the Swim Team top level menu doesn’t look very good when the menu is active. It looks find when another menu is active. This shouldn’t be too hard to fix though.
I am pretty happy with the other changes I made. The most notable being moving the Options tab off the Management page to it’s own page and breaking the huge form up into four separate forms. The options (aka settings) are all now logically grouped. I also fixed a couple bugs I encountered as I was testing it.
I also moved the Report Generator off the Management menu into it’s own page as well as I envision having several standard reports available in addition to the Report Generator.
Before I know it swim team season will be here again and it has been a while since I worked on the plugin. Uh-oh. This fall has been busy, busy, busy with other stuff and I put the plugin development on the back burner for a while.
Since I last worked on the plugin, WordPress 2.7 has been released. WordPress 2.7 is so much better than any of the prior releases, going forward I expect it will be a requirement to continue to use the plugin. The Dashboard integration will be much more elegant if I require 2.7.
Look for some new updates in the very near future.
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