As it turns out the mistake our volunteer made was an honest one and I tracked it down by examining the Opt-In/Opt-Out records in the database.  I have always logged the user ID for the user who submitted an Opt-In/Opt-Out request but never displayed it as I never had a need.  It would have been really useful last weekend – imagine digging through your database using phpMyAdmin on an iPhone which is how I found it because I wasn’t anywhere near a computer at the time.

As a result of this exercise I have enhanced the Swim Meet Report on the Report menu to optionally show the user detail for the user who submitted the request.  I also changed the Time Stamp so it can be shown if desired.  Both of these options are on by default.

This release also addresses a bug where Opt-In/Opt-Out email confirmations were being sent to the Registration e-mail address.  For a lot of teams this is probably same address but for the MacDolphins it is not.  The result was our Accountant was being flooded with Opt-In/Opt-Out email confirmations and has been for the past three years!  She never mentioned it to me until recently.  Oops!

The release is now available from the Download page but has not been committed to the WordPress Plugin Repository yet because WordPress changed all of their passwords last week.  While I can login to WordPress.com without any problems, I cannot get access to the plugin repository.  Hopefully I will get this sorted out soon and then it should appear as an automatic update from the WordPress plugin repository shortly.

Update: I finally got my WordPress.org password issue straightened out and have committed the latest set of changes.  The automatic update process should proceed within a couple hours.

If you run into this problem, let me know – there is a fairly easy work-around that will prevent it from happening.

• Fixed bug in Opt-In/Opt-Out e-mail confirmation which duplicated recipients.
• Fixed bug in handling Country when set to US Only.
• Added Club Profile initialization based on State or Province in Team Profile.
• Added E-mail confirmation for Job Assignments.
• Added Job Options tab on Options page to configuring Jobs module.

Make sure you visit the Job Options tab to configure your jobs module.  There is still work to be done to report the number of credits a user has signed up for and to flag which users have not met the threshold.  Hopefully that functionality will come in the next week or two.

Update: This release had a minor update due to a file missing from the WordPress plugin repository.  The missing file prevented the Jobs Options tab from rendering.  Other minor tweaks were also made to the Jobs Confirmation e-mails.

1. Prior to this release a new user could add a swimmer without completing their swim team parent/guardian profile but a warning was displayed.  The warning is now an error and no further action can proceed until the profile information is completed.
2. Throughout the wp-SwimTeam dashboard much of the information is displayed in a widget that can be searched, sorted, and paged through.  The number of rows that is displayed is now controlled by a setting on the Options->Miscellaneous tab.
3. A couple of minor bugs have fixed with respect to reporting.
4. There was a serious bug which occurred when the number of User or Swimmer optional fields was set to zero.  This has been fixed and the ability to essentially “turn off” optional fields for users or swimmers now works correctly.

1. It is now possible to export a single swimmer’s record to CSV of SDIF.  When a single swimmer is selected, the exported file will contain the information for just that swimmer.  When no swimmers are selected, the entire roster will be exported.  Single swimmer SDIF export is useful for importing late additions into WinSwim which is something I’ve had to do a few times this week.
2. The LSC Registration Pyramid (SDIF) can now be generated using the Age Group Age (computed base on cut off date) instead of the swimmer’s true age.  By default the real age is exported which is what wp-SwimTeam has done traditionally.  If you want to use the computed Age Group Age, change the setting on the SDIF Profile tab from the Options menu.

A new version, v0.2.486, of wp-SwimTeam is available for download from the Download page.

If you are using an Optional Swimmer Field (OSF) to track something like “Fees Paid” as a “Yes-No” field, you can use the new Global Update to reset them all to the “No” state.  This functionality may be applied to Optional User Fiends (UOU) as well but right now it is limited to only OSF fields.  Additionally, the “Results” field currently is displayed but changing it has no effect.

There are a few other changes that I fixed as I run into things and I also fixed the situation with the Swim Team Profile labels Michael Hale ran into recently.  The issue there was if the label was only numeric it was invalid HTML for the field name.  There is now a check to ensure that whatever text is specified for the label will now be valid for an HTML attribute.

This version also changes how the Status field is determined.  It is now derived based on the Active Season.  There is an issue sorting on the Status field on the All Swimmers tab so it is currently disabled.

You can find v0.1.450 on the Download page.  I strongly recommend backing up your database before installing this version.

Opt-In/Opt-Out

Improvements have been made to the Opt-In/Opt-Out process to make it much less confusing.  The Opt-In/Opt-Out form is now smarter, only presenting the list of strokes to the user when a Partial Opt-In/Opt-Out is selected.  The ability to Opt-In/Opt-Out has also been added to the “My Swimmers” tab to make it easier to find.

Login Redirect

I’ve also added a new option to control what happens when end users login to a site running wp-SwimTeam.  For most users, landing on the WordPress Dashboard page is confusing.  They don’t care about 99% of the stuff presented to them nor should they.  The plugin now allows definition of a login redirect so the user can be sent to either the home page or the Swim Team Overview (which is what I expect to use most of the time) page.  Landing on the Swim Team Overview page makes the most sense for most users since when they login, they are most likely doing some level of interaction with the swim team functionality.

Results Import

Results import is still  in progress, the other two areas mentioned above are complete.  At this point importing results does little more than perform a first pass validation that the supplied file is indeed a SDIF results file.  Now that I have the uploading and validation complete, I need to work on the data model to store results.  Results will be connected to swimmers and meets and events.  Since a new table will be created, results will change the database version when it is released.

Initially I expect to simply report results from a meet and be able to look at results for any given swimmer.  Longer term I want to use Open Flash Chart to plot results on a per swimmer basis over the course of a season or possibly several seasons.  I don’t expect to get to this until much later this year though.

WordPress 2.8.x

I am still working with WordPress 2.7.1 in my development environment.  I haven’t even tried 2.8.4 yet so I have no idea what the impact is.  I will likely do so once I am done with the results.

This build also introduces a new type of optional field the NO-YES option.  This is similar to the YES-NO option but defaults to NO instead of YES.

When a field is defined as “administrative”, only users with WordPress permissions of EDITOR or higher will have the fields visible.  For all other users, they are hidden.  An Admin or Editor can change the value of the field and it will be saved when the user or swimmer data is saved.

The first practical usage of this is with a team that wants to mark registration fees as paid on a per swimmer basis.  Not the sort of thing you would expose to a parent but useful from a logistics perspective.

Both user and administrative fields are available in reports.

I have been noodling on how to implement the MacDolphins need for an online scratch sheet solution since I started this project.  It was one of the areas we really struggle with.  We’ve had a scratch sheet posted on the bulletin board for people to sign up on but it was ineffective.  We’ve tried using e-mail which worked better but getting the information from the collection point to the heat sheet continued to be problematic.  Hopefully connecting it to the web site will be a good solution to this ongoing problem.

The basic functionality is now working.  When a swim meet is entered into the system, it is characterized as either Opt-In or Opt-Out (the labels can be set from the Options menu).  An Opt-In meet requires all swimmers to register in order to participate.  An Opt-Out swim meet assumes all active swimmers are participating unless the swimmer withdraws from a meet (or subset of meet events).  For the MacDolphins, all dual meets are Opt-Out events and our local invitational city meet is an Opt-In event.

In addition to the new Opt-In/Opt-Out functionality (which doesn’t include reports yet), I made quite a few improvements to the UI, particularly with the messages which are displayed after an action is executed.  I also took care of some CSS issues which were most notable when using the default light blue Dashboard color scheme.  I prefer the grey one which is why I hadn’t noticed the problem previously.

The next phase of Opt-In/Opt-Out will be reporting followed by exporting a meet specific roster in SDIF format.