wp-SwimTeam

I flew out to Phoenix and back this week and had some airplane time to work on wp-SwimTeam.  I have completed what I am calling “Phase 2″ of the Event Model changes.  Events can now be assigned to a swim meet AND the Opt-In/Opt-Out system is working in the Event Mode (which I had broken in v1.18).

The majority of the work in this build is related to Events and their connection to swim meets which is the precursor to Phase 3 which will be the generation of Meet Entries in SDIF format that can be imported into tools like MeetManager and WinSwim.  I have also fixed quite a few bugs in the report manager which were present when either the User or Swimmer option count was set to zero.  There was some logic that didn’t test right and would result in using the default count which is 5.  So if you have seen checkboxes without labels on the User or Swimmer report generator, this has been fixed.

Please let me know if you run into any issues.  I am doing some testing with our team right now and we have our pre-season open house this weekend which tends to result in a good chunk of our registrations.  Assuming all goes well, I’ll release an update to the WordPress repository early next week if not sooner.

I’ve had a couple requests to support WordPress multi-site installations with wp-SwimTeam.  The Tab Model and Form Processor I use require some URL manipulation to work correctly and my original implementation works fine for “normal” installations but breaks when installed in a sub-directory which is pretty common with WordPress multi-site.  I’ve put off fixing in favor of other things but recently did some work on another project which got me thinking about the URL problem.

After getting the Event Module done I decided to take a look at fixing the URL problem and found it wasn’t too hard to fix.  The bigger problem was how pervasive my broken solution was!  I think I have found every place which required a fix.  Before I release an update I’d really like someone to try it with multi-site and give me some feedback.

This afternoon I released v1.18.747 of wp-SwimTeam.  This release includes what I am calling Phase 1 of the new Event Model.  The event model has been completely overhauled in anticipation of being able to generate Meet Entry files in SDIF format directly from wp-SwimTeam.  The whole Events tab looks and works differently.  Events are collected into what I call Event Groups.  This release adds the ability to import events from a Hy-tek Events File (.hyv).  Events are managed (added, deleted, imported, re-ordered, etc.) within the context of an event group.  In Phase 2 events will be connected to a swim meet via an event group although the swim meet will still retain the ability to re-order the events on a meet by meet basis.

Key features in this release are:

• Phase 1 of overhauled Event Model is complete. The new Event Model introduces the concept of Event Groups. Events are now defined in the context of an Event Group. Swim meets currently do not have any connection to Events but that will chance in a release fairly shortly in Phase 2.
• Added ability to import events from a Hy-tek Events File (.hyv) into an Event Group.
• Added ability to delete all events from an Event Group.
• Changed Google Maps API Key from required to optional. If the API key hasn’t been entered, wp-SwimTeam will now gracefully work without it.

I changed a lot of code in this release, if you run into anything odd or functionality that isn’t working or behaves differently, let me know ASAP and I’ll do my best to fix it quickly.  Now that I am back to a stable code base I should be able to turn bug fixes pretty quickly.  That is hard to do when you’re doing a bunch of remodeling!

This release has been committed to the WordPress Plugin Repository so you should an update notification on your Dashboard.  You can also download it and manually update it from the Download & Installation Page.

Edit (4/16/2012 @ 10:07 AM):  This update includes a database update so you must de-activate and re-activate the plugin after updating to have the database upgrade run.  One of these days I’ll figure out a more elegant way to do this!

If you updated to any of the wp-SwimTeam v1.16.x releases you must update again to v1.17.707.  I inadvertently introduced a bug which prevented almost all of the registration (season, swim meet, etc.) actions.  I quickly fixed this bug once I became aware of it, I apologize for any inconvenience.

This morning I posted an update to wp-SwimTeam.

This release fixes a couple more places where the first and/or last name should appear but was being displayed as “N/A”.  It turns out I had re-used the same code which I had fixed a couple weeks ago in some other spots so the problem was the same.  This time I fixed it by moving the solution down into a parent class and eliminated a bunch of redundant code.  Hopefully it is gone but there is an outside chance I missed one.

Anyone who has used wp-SwimTeam may recall that the actions used to be buttons across the bottom of the widget I frequently use to display data.  This worked well until I had more actions than I had room for buttons.  My solution was to move the actions into a drop down list and many of the tabs used this model.  This release reconciles the inconsistencies so all tabs now use the drop down action model.

I have started work on some of the event changes I have posted about, hopefully I’ll have some new functionality in the next week or so.

This evening I released a new version of the phpHtmlLib plugin which wp-SwimTeam depends on.  This update addresses a number of PHP5 deprecated function warnings which are commonly seen when running under PHP5 with E_STRICT set.  I also fixed an icon bug which appeared on the GUI widget used across wp-SwimTeam when there was no data to display.

The update also removes the documentation and examples from the version of the plugin hosted in the WordPress plugin repository since they are only useful for developers.  A full version of the plugin including documentation and examples can be downloaded from the Download & Installation page.

I ran into a problem this past week that I am not sure will affect anyone else but my own swim team.  Our volunteer coordinator let me know that she was unable to add new jobs.  I couldn’t replicate the behavior in my development area which required me to debug it on the live server (ugh).

Because most of the things I add and/or changes I make to wp-SwimTeam are for the MacDolphins (but not always), I usually test them on the MacDolphins web site before releasing an update.  When I first added the Jobs module to wp-SwimTeam I had defined column names in the database table.  At some point I decided to be more descriptive with my names and changed the column names.  I think, but I can’t be sure, that I did this before publicly releasing the plugin update.  WordPress usually, but unfortunately not always, handles database schema changes correctly and will change column names.

In my case, WordPress, for whatever reason, didn’t change the column name, it defined a new one.  While this isn’t of itself a real problem, having a few unused columns in the database isn’t preferred, it isn’t a real big problem either.  Except that the default value for the column was never defined (oops) and at some point, MySQL (maybe MySQL5) started to care that the column wasn’t initialized.

The net result was we was we were unable to add new jobs because MySQL was returning an error message due to the uninitialized column that wp-SwimTeam wasn’t accounting for.  The simple solution for us was to simply delete the columns that shouldn’t have been there in the first place and won’t ever be there for people using the plugin now.

In the process of chasing this problem down, I found an area of my database interface where I wasn’t properly accounting for possible database errors.  I have updated the database interface class and the Jobs module which sits on top of it.  Over time I will also retrofit this change into other parts of the plugin as I work on them.

Look for a plugin update to be released in the next day or so.

I have addressed the bug which slipped through the last build and released v1.14.674.  There was a situation when querying for a users first name or last name against a username where the first or last name didn’t exist, the WordPress API returned an empty array and sometimes returned a one element array containing an empty string.  I am not sure if this is due to different versions of PHP or some other nuance but this update correctly accounts for both situations.  The bug manifested itself as a warning from the phpHtmlLib plugin (which wp-SwimTeam depends on).

The update should appear in the WordPress Dashboard shortly and is available now from the Download Page.

This afternoon I posted an update to wp-SwimTeam.  You can get v1.13.669 from the download page or update from the WordPress plugin repository (recommended).  This update fixes several bugs:

1. First and last name were displayed as “N/A” on the Users list on both the Swim Team tab and the Manage tab.
2. The default values for “State or Province” and “Postal Code” were not stored correctly so in a new installation, the registration form would not work until these fields were set in the Options.
3. Removed borders from sections of the Options->Swim Team form that were used for debugging the form layout and had inadvertently been left behind.   Some other minor tweaks to the layout were also made.
4. Rudimentary 3.3.1 testing has been performed.

The update is already in the WordPress plugin repository so you should see notification on your Dashboard soon.

The simple answer is:  I don’t know.  Usually I try to at least smoke test wp-SwimTeam before a new release of WordPress goes out but I haven’t gotten to it yet for 3.2.  We’ve had two swim meets in a row postponed due to weather which means all of the pre-work has to be done twice.  Bleh.  Tonight’s forecast doesn’t look much better either.  I will try and run some tests before the end of the week but for now I recommend staying on 3.1.4.