wp-SwimTeam

About a week ago one of the volunteers inadvertently registered (Opt-In) our entire rosters for a swim meet.  An Opt-In will supercede any existing Opt-In or Opt-Out information so we lost our entire scratch list for our meet this past Tuesday.  I was out running errands getting my son ready to go on a mission trip when I started seeing numerous registration e-mails coming across my phone.  Yikes – what happened?  Initially I thought someone had gotten administrative access to our database and was playing games.

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.

I have just released wp-SwimTeam v.1.5.579, you can find it on the download page and shortly, via the automatic plugin updater.  This release fixes an issue which has bothered me personally for a long time.

There was a problem in the E-mail Confirmation code for both registrations and opt-in/opt-out.  This same code was used for the new Jobs module so it existed there too.  For a long time the confirmation e-mails were duplicated and if a swimmer had to two contacts, only one of them would receive the e-mail.  I have finally found and fixed this problem so e-mail confirmation should be cleaner and sent to the appropriate people.

A minor bug was found in swimmer and user profiles when the optional field count was zero.  This bug only appeared if previously the option count had been non-zero and data had been entered for swimmers and/or users for the optional fields.  This release fixes this problem which also manifested itself in the registration confirmation e-mail.

A new version of wp-SwimTeam has been posted.  This releases fixes a couple minor bugs which prevented display of swim meet information in certain situations when scratching or registering from a swim meet.  This version also introduces two new features:

1. Open or Close the registration system. When the registration system is open, users can register their swimmers for the current season.  When the registration system is closed, only an Admin or Editor can register swimmers.  This setting appears on the Registration tab from the Options sub-menu.
2. Enable or disable user sign ups for jobs. When the job system is set for user sign ups, a user can sign up for any open job.  When the job system is set for admin sign up, users with either Admin or Editor roles can sign users up for jobs.  This second mode is good for teams where a paper or Excel list is used for job sign ups.  This setting appears on the Swim Team tab from the Options sub-menu.

I have not done much work on wp-SwimTeam over the past few months but about a week ago I dusted off my virtual machine (have I ever mentioned how much I love VMware Workstation?) in preparation for the upcoming season.  Since I last worked on the project there have been numerous patches for Windows XP (my development area is an XP VM) and WordPress has moved from 2.7 through the 2.8.x releases and is now on 2.9.1.

All new work will be done against 2.9.1 (for now) so I have upgraded WordPress and the plugins that I use in conjunction with wp-SwimTeam.  There are two areas where I will focus on immediately – importing results which I never finished last year and volunteer management.  I’ll probably finish the portion of results I am working on right now and then move on to volunteer management since we’ll need that functionality in March when the MacDolphins do registration.

I had a request to support fields that weren’t visible to the end users when they used the system.  I decided to support these “administrative” fields as I have been referring to them by enhancing the optional fields for swimmers and users to be tagged as “user” fields or “administrative” fields.

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.

In the build I posted yesterday there were a couple of bugs which prevented the auto-registration feature to work when a swimmer is added.  There was also a bug in the age verification which allowed swimmers outside of the age range to added to the system and then registered for the active season.

If you download v0.1.375 yesterday, you will want to download v0.1.376 and update the plugin.

I have released a new version of the phpHtmlLib plugin for download.  This is a minor update which fixes an issue when WordPress is installed in a sub-directory.  The icons for the widgets would not be displayed when WordPress was installed this way.

This afternoon I uploaded v0.0.322 of the wp-SwimTeam plugin.

Bug Fixes

• Permission requirements were wrong – to do much of anything required the user to have Administrator permissions.  It now works as outlined in the earlier post today.
• Reporting has been fixed to account for an odd database query issue where in some cases, the age group for swimmers would show up as “none”.

Enhancements

• Registration has been enhanced to support registration fees.  This is still a work in progress.  The fees can be entered but nothing is done with them yet.

It has been a pretty hectic week for Swim Team and as such, I have found some bugs and some minor annoyances and tried to fix most of them.  The most serious bug was in the SDIF export which I was working with one of our coaches on so he could started working with WinSwim with our roster.  If the parent profile wasn’t entered, the last last profile found was being used to construct the D1 and D2 records.  Now when a parent profile record isn’t found, it reverts to the site admin’s record to populate the data.

I also switched a bunch of the swimmer lists (roster, all swimmers) back to sorting by last name because that is how the data is usually looked at.  I also fixed a bug in the age computation which was rather elusive – it only appeared once in a while.  It turns out the logic was wrong in an age computation function I had grabbed off a PHP site a while back.  Lastly, I made progress on the swimmer id/number/label but am not yet computing them.  I think all of the infrastructure for them is down now.