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.
WordPress 3.2 beta is out for testing and with it comes several requirements. The two notable requirements are PHP 5.2.14 or newer and MySQL 5.0 or newer. I will likely move to 3.2 for wp-SwimTeam development once it is released and I’ve done some testing with it. I’ve been running under PHP5 (5.2.14 and 5.3.x) for a while now so I don’t see this as an issue but it might be for people running on older web hosts.
WordPress has a nice built in feature to update plugins when there is a new version available. Because wp-SwimTeam isn’t hosted in the official WordPress plugin repository, I haven’t been able to take advantage of this feature.
I have set up projects in the official WordPress plugin repository for both wp-SwimTeam and phpHtmlLib. I am working on a process where the plugin updater will work by adding the code into the WordPress repository when Iam ready to release it.
Currently the version of the code in the WordPress repository is the same as what is available for download although the version number reported is wrong (1.0.553 vs 1.2.553). The “553″ is the critical part of the release number because it represents the Subversion commit number (build number) that the release is based on.
If you see a “plugin out of date” message within the WordPress Dashboard, it is because I am working on this process. The latest and greatest release will likely be available first as a download on this site but when I reach what I consider a “stable” release, I will also make it available through the WordPress plugin repository. Stay tuned as this flushes out.
I had some airplane seat time over the last couple days and had a chance to look into the potential bug thatI posed about a couple days ago. I have not discovered the source of the bug yet, I am even more convinced it is from a plugin conflict of some sort.
However, in the process of trying to find it I enabled some WordPress debug features and found a bunch of little things wrong with wp-SwimTeam. Prior to WordPress 3.0 most of these either didn’t happen or didn’t matter and the end user never was exposed to them. I have spent a fair amount of time cleaning them up as they DO matter in 3.0.x and still have a few more to do.
I hope to have a new release out by the end of the week.
I apologize for how slow this web site has been lately. I don’t visit it myself too often when I am not actively working on wp-SwimTeam so I was somewhat oblivious to it. My sites are hosted with GoDaddy and I’ve never really had an issue with their shared hosting service. It is cheap, easy to administer, and for the low volume traffic I tend to get, more than adequate.
I called GoDaddy this morning to see why my sites was loading so slowly – I am seeing page load times of 30-40 seconds which is just plain silly. It looks like another web site that I happen to be sharing the “shared” server with is consuming all of the resources. GoDaddy is going to monitor it and see what is up. I expect it will remain slow for at least a few days. Hopefully they’ll figure out what it is and do something about it but they did tell me that if the other site isn’t violating their TOS, there isn’t much I can do about it. They also suggested I look into a WordPress caching plugin. I don’t have near the volume of data nor traffic to warrant a caching plugin but if the situation persists, I’ll look into it.
Bleh. Even on a shared server there ought to be some expectation of “reasonable” performance. I will continue to monitor the performance and see what I can do about it.
I have finally had some time to do testing against WordPress 3.0.1 and in the process, I have ran into a couple bugs that I need to fix. So far I haven’t found any issues running against WP 3.0.1 itself, the things I’ve run into would be an issue with any version of WordPress. These are known issues:
- Critical: Adding a Season will fail with an error regarding an Unsupported Action. This failure is due to a typo in a constant. I am not aware of a work-around.
- Critical: The Users tab on the Manage menu yields a blank screen. The cause is unknown and I am not aware of a work-around.
I hope to have these bugs fixed later this week and fully qualify WordPress 3.0.1.
This afternoon I uploaded v0.2.482 of wp-SwimTeam. This release introduces the new Jobs module (aka Volunteers). Please back up your database before upgrading as this version changes the structure of one of the tables and introduces two others.
Please let me know if you have any problems with this version. I’ve done a fair amount of testing and I have it up and running on the MacDolphins web site.
The jobs module introduces two new short codes:
- wpst_job_descriptions
- wpst_meet_job_assignments
Example usage of these two new short codes can be found on the wp-SwimTeam demo site here and here.
There is also a new release of the phpHtmlLib plugin which wp-SwimTeam requires available. This build addresses a minor issue exposed in WordPress 3.0 beta testing.
Hopefully the new Jobs module will be helpful for your team, I know it will be helpful for mine!
WordPress 3.0 is expected to be out sometime in May. I figured I ought to do some basic testing to see if changes to WordPress would have any significant impact on wp-SwimTeam.
I have a Linux Virtual Machine which I have set up such that I can always run the bleeding edge of WordPress – right out of the Subversion repository. When a new version of WordPress is ready to come out I update my Linux VM with the current state of WordPress and the current state of wp-SwimTeam and run some tests.
I started doing this a couple weeks ago and got busy and never finished it. This morning, I got back to it. It turns out, it didn’t run very well. Both wp-SwimTeam and phpHtmlLib plugins were calling deprecated WordPress functions. In releases prior to 3.0, there were no warnings about calling a deprecated function but 3.0 has a new warning feature. The way it is implemented, the warnings actually caused a failure with phpHtmlLib which resulted in WordPress not successfully loading.
I have fixed the problems in both plugins and committed the changes. However, I have not released new builds yet so until I do, I advise sticking with the 2.9.x release of WordPress. I expect a new build later this week at the latest.
I haven’t posted much but I have been working on wp-SwimTeam off and on now that the MacDolphins summer season is over. I haven’t released anything yet but I’ve made some significant improvements.
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.
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.
Recent Comments