Author Archives: Mike Walsh

08.24.11
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Moving forward with Thematic

I haven’t had much time to work on any of my theme projects but in the last week or so I’ve been trying spend some free cycles on something I am called “Middle School – High School Boosters Club” theme.

My wife is the president of our Middle School Boosters Club this year and much like the swim team was years ago when I got involved, the Boosters Club has no web presence and just about everything is done on paper.  Bleh.  She has asked me to build a web site for the Boosters Club so I am  using it as an opportunity to choose a new theme framework (I’ve settled on Thematic) and see how much stuff I can leverage from Google Apps to build them a solution that doesn’t require me to babysit it all the time. We’ll see how that goes!

As I noted in a prior post, the Wicked WordPress Themes book has been a good resource to get me going with Thematic.  I also found a Thematic Child Theme called Byty which caught my eye and I decided I wanted something similar.  The downside of Byty is a lot of the nice gradient effects have been achieved with images as opposed to CSS.  That is understandable as gradients were not available until CSS3.  However, I want whatever I build to be fairly modern so I’ve decided to go down the CSS3 route.

I am specifically not building a theme for our school but instead and building one which can be tailored for any school by selecting a color scheme.  We’ll see how well I accomplish that!  These are some of the requirements that I am working against which I suspect would be similar for any other school boosters club that may want a web site.

  1. Online Store with PayPal/Credit Card Payments
  2. Support for Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages
  3. Color schemes
  4. Custom Logo(s)
  5. Calendar(s) for game and practice schedules
  6. Sport specific pages featuring just the posts relevant to that sport

Since Google Calendar is dead simple to use and with so many people using Gmail already, it seemed like the logical choice to base the calendar solution on.  Google Apps is free for organizations like a boosters club to  use to registering our domain with Google Apps was the first thing I did.  This also makes it easy to create e-mail accounts for the various people associated with the club (president, secretary, etc.) so they can perform their task without polluting their personal email.

Once Google Apps was configured, I created a Calendar for each of the sports we will support (Football, Volleyball, Boys and Girls Soccer, Softball, Boys and Girls Basketball, etc.).  These calendars can be viewed separately or combined making it easy to view the whole calendar or just the calendar for a specific sport.  Even better, WordPress supports Google Calendar vias oEmbed turning a Google Calendar URL into a Gcal short code!  About the only downside I have found so far is it is very hard to style the Google Calendar, I’d really like the light blue Google uses to be a different color to match the rest of the site but I will live with it based on how easy managing the calendar will be!

I’ve decided to use Simple Twitter Connect and Simple Facebook Connect, both from Otto, for Twitter and Facebook integration.  I’ve used them before so they were familiar to me.  Based on the recommendation from the Wicked WordPress  Themes, I also tried AddThis but it is a  bit more invasive than I want so I went back to SFC and STC.

For an online shop, I am going with eShop which is a very simple shopping cart plugin.  Since we’re selling just a few items (e.g. t-shirts, sweatshirts, etc.), we don’t need anything complex and eShop looks like it will do what we need.

The site isn’t online yet so there isn’t anything to see but hopefully I will have a demo up and running fairly soon.  I need to do some more CSS work and get the custom page loops I want.  I am impressed with how easy Thematic has been to work with.

07.25.11
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Season over, what next?

Our 2011 Summer Season is over and I will actually have some time to get back to work on wp-SwimTeam.  I find it hard to work on it during the season as I spend a lot of time doing swim team stuff.  Other than fixing something serious, I don’t have much free time to work on the plugin during the season.

But now the season is over and I won’t be working with our coach on line ups, spending time at the pool, etc, and I can spend some time on it again.  After our season there are a number of things I want to implement that I know we need for the MacDolphins:

  1. GUI improvements – there are a number of places the GUI can be confusing and needs some help.  I also hope to add some icons to make things a bit more intuitive.
  2. Export Meet Entries – all of the information can be stored with wp-SwimTeam, there is no reason why a Meet Entries file can’t be exported per the SDIF specification.
  3. Swimmer Reminders – similar to the volunteer reminder e-mails that can be sent in bulk, I plan to add the ability to send out swimmer reminder emails.  I am hoping that these reminder e-mails will improve the scratch process for us and eliminate our no-shows.
  4. Results – I have some work done (see the Flip-Turn demo) but do not have it integrated with wp-SwimTeam yet.  It isn’t complicated work but there is a lot of it to do.
  5. Hy-tek compatibility – there is some work done by others that should enable better Hy-tek compatibility.  I am hopeful that I can actually generate and/or process Hy3 and HYV files for entries, result, and events.
  6. New Theme – the MacDolphins theme needs to be updated.  It is based on the Sandbox theme and WordPress has evolved quite a bit since Sandbox was developed and even my extensions to Sandbox for the Sandbox-SwimTeam theme are showing their age.
07.24.11
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Looking at Thematic for new projects

I built a number of WordPress themes based on the Sandbox theme.  Unfortunately I think it is time to migrate to a new theme framework.  I need to update a couple themes and I’ve been putting it off knowing that continuing to invest in Sandbox was probably a dead end.

After reading a bit and finding a book I like, Wicked WordPress Themes, I’ve decided to develop a child theme based on Thematic for my Middle School web project.  I should have bought the book from Amazon.com, it was $15 cheaper than my local Barnes and Noble but I wanted it immediately.

07.22.11
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WordPress and Google Apps

I am starting on a new project to help our middle school.  The athletic teams and PTA do not have any sort of web presence so information is scattered across lots of web sites and it changes from year to year.  My wife is running the Boosters Club this year and asked me if I’d help put something together.  My work with the MacDolphins swim team has been a good experience for this as I want to assemble something that is sustainable and easy to add content to.

I’ve decided to use Google Apps for as much as a I can as (a) it is free and (b) it is unlikely to go away.  My plan is to use WordPress for the web site and Google Apps for pretty much everything else.  I am hoping to integrate some of the Google Apps content, in particular, calendars, on the web site.

07.05.11
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WordPress 3.2 compatibility?

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.

06.27.11
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Quick update to wpSwimTeam v1.12.662

There was a typo in one of commits I made over the weekend which resulted in the Opt-In/Opt-Out CC address not working correctly.  This release fixes that problem (which was affecting the MacDolphins).  The release is available from the Download page and has also been committed to the Plugin repository.  It should appear via the Auto-Updater in the next hour or two.

Update: I had the version number wrong in the post title – the correct version is 1.12.662.

06.25.11
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wp-SwimTeam v1.11.659 now available

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.

06.20.11
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wp-SwimTeam v1.10.651 now available

I have tracked down the problem that was causing the opt-in/opt-out list to be displayed incorrectly when called from the wpst_meet_report short code.  I have fixed the problem and made a new release available.  The release is now available from the Download page and has been committed to the WordPress Plugin Repository.  It should appear as an automatic update from the WordPress automatic update process in the next couple of hours.

 

06.20.11
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Definite bug in Swim Meet Report short code

There is definitely an issue with the Swim Meet Report, particularly the opt-in/opt-out list, produced by the wpst_meet_report short code.  It produces different results depending on whether or not a user is logged in to the web site and what WordPress capabilities the user has.  I hope to have a solution this morning as it is causing a fair amount of confusion with my own team!

06.19.11
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Looking at Meet Entries

I have started looking at generating meet entries (SDIF) directly from wp-SwimTeam.  When you factor in events, strokes, registrations, scratches, and relays, the problem of generating meet entries becomes fairly complicated.  I’ve been sitting on the couch watching golf and perusing the SDIF specification and have a pretty good idea of what I want to do, now I just need to decide how to do it.  For the time being, I think I am going to focus on individual events as they are much easier generate than the relay events.  However, I don’t want code myself into a corner and make relay events hard to implement so I can’t decide what to do.  I also need to decide if I approach this from a roster perspective (ie by swimmer) or from the meet perspective (ie by event).  Hmmm …. decisions, decisions!