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.

This build completes the changes to the option model for the optional fields for users and swimmers.  In prior builds the optional fields were hard coded at 5 for both swimmers and users and the data was stored as part of the user and swimmer records.  This build allows an administrator to set the number of optional fields for users and swimmers (independently) and offers several new types of optional fields (required and optional URLs and e-mail addresses) and stores optional data in a separate table.

The extent of this change was pretty extensive which is why there hasn’t been a release in almost a month.  Unfortunately the old option data is not migrated to the new table so if you are using optional fields, you may have to re-enter some data.  I had to do this with my own swim team.  It is a nuisance.  The old data is still in the database in the users and swimmers table but not accessed.

This build also fixes numerous GUI nits with messages and guidance, it should all be consistent now although I am sure I have missed something.  It also fixes a bug with age groups when swimmer label prefixes are not being used.

I strongly recommend backing up your database before installing this update!

Anyway, I am back and have been working on re-implementing how I had handled the optional fields for users and swimmers.  It has always bothered me that I had hard coded five (5) optional fields in – I knew it was wrong but never bothered to work out a better solution.  Before I left for Sweden I implemented a new model which is loosely based on how WordPress handles user meta data.

I had completed the work on the user and swimmer profile aspect of the new option model but the Report Generator was broken as was the ability to export users and swimmers in CSV format.  It turns  out fixing the Report Generator was more involved than I thought it would be but I now have the User portion of it completed and committed to SVN.  Doing the swimmer report should be pretty straight forward, I can reuse most of the code.  The hard part is done, to do it for swimmers is pretty simple.

So what is the downside?  I haven’t figured out a good way to migrate any information currently stored in the old option fields to the new model.  For our swim team I think I am just going to manually re-enter since we have decided to eliminate one of the fields anyway.

On the upside, the new option models allows the site administrator to configure an arbitrary number of extra fields and fields can now be defined as URL, E-mail, Text, Clothing Size, or Yes-No fields.