Preparing for a new release

I’ve been working on wp-SwimTeam over the past couple days and fixed a lot of minor issues and a couple of bigger ones and one critical one in phpHtmlLib.  The change in phpHtmlLib is absolutely required to support WordPress 3.0 and later so it will be necessary to update the phpHtmlLib plugin in addition to the latest update.

This upcoming release of wp-SwimTeam is ONLY being tested against WordPress 3.0.x (3.0.4 in my case).  It may work fine with 2.9.x but I do not plan to test it.  This upcoming release also tweaks the database, dropping columns that are no longer used.  This is primarily an issue with the Users and Swimmers table where there were some remnants left from the previous implementation of optional fields.  Make sure you backup your database prior to installing!

The release should be available in the next day or two.

Potential Bug follow up

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.

Potential problems with WordPress 3.0.x

I have encountered a problem running wp-SwimTeam under WordPress 3.0.4 on the MacDolphins web site which causes pages to not load completely.  I am not sure what the problem is yet but it seems to be related to another plugin as it doesn’t happen on the wp-SwimTeam Demo site.  It is most evident from the Swim Team -> Users tab where the page content is simply blank.  I hope to have a resolution to the problem in the next day or two.

Flip-Turn – swim results management

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had started working on a new swim team project.  I am calling it Flip-Turn.  Flip-Turn is a basic PHP/MySQL web application which allows a swim team or swim association to publish swim results on the web in a format that is easy to navigate and view.

Dealing with results has been the last real big hole in wp-SwimTeam and I’ve started working on it a couple times only to abandon it because I didn’t like where it was headed.  Over the winter I had an e-mail dialog where a team was simply looking to store results in a database so they could be easily displayed on a web page.  As I started thinking about this I came to the conclusion that it would be an interesting project to work on and would be an easy way for me to find a better way to manage results.

For the last couple weeks I have been working on Flip-Turn as time permits and I now have a basic demo up and running.  You can see it here:  http://demo.flip-turn.com The demo is pretty simple, it allows a user to upload results in SDIF format and parses the results and stores them in a database.  The results can then be queried based on swimmer, event, or swim meet.  While pretty basic, it works pretty well.

In its current state Flip-Turn doesn’t deal with relay (E0) records but does handle individual (D0) records correctly.  In most cases, what people seem to be concerned with are their individual results so that is what I have focused on.  I don’t anything I have done will prevent dealing with relay records at a later date but for now, I don’t plan to address them.

Wile the code seems fairly robust, I am not ready to distribute the code yet as I don’t have a great solution for initializing the database tables or changes to the tables.  I need to figure something out there – right now I have an SQL script that needs to be run against the database to create the tables.  I used phpMyAdmin to initialize mine.

I fully expect to roll this effort back into wp-SwimTeam as this is something I’ve wanted to do for our swim team for a couple seasons.