Author Archives: Mike Walsh

04.01.09
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wp-SwimTeam v0.0.322 posted

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.
04.01.09
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Roles and Capabilities for wp-SwimTeam

WordPress has a built in set of Roles and Capabilities.  The wp-SwimTeam plugin makes use of these standard roles and capabilities to allow certain actions to be performed.  At least it is supposed to.  It turns out that when I redesigned the menus to take advantage of the 2.7 Dashboard, I restricted access to all of the menus except the end user capability to users with Administrator privileges.

This is a mistake and this morning I committed a change which will rectify the problem.  The way it is supposed to work is as follows:

  • Subscriber – access to the “Swim Team” end user menu and capability.
  • Author – Subscriber capability plus access to the Report Generators.
  • Editor – Author capability plus access to the Manage menu and capability.
  • Administrator – Author capability plus access to the Options menu.

In theory the Options menu contains items which should be set once and by in large, left alone.  The Management menu contains the items which require regular interaction from one or more users who coordinate the Swim Team.

03.25.09
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wp-SwimTeam Forum

Today I set up a Simple:Press forum for wp-SwimTeam.  You can find it on the Forum page.  The intent of the forum is to offer a single place for people to ask questions and get assistance for wp-SwimTeam as opposed to sending me e-mail (which is still ok).  The main benefit of using the forum is other people can see the questions and answers and may find a solution to their problem quickly.  Feel free to register and post, I will do my best to respond in a timely manner.

03.25.09
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wp-SwimTeam v0.0.313

wp-SwimTeam v0.0.313 is now available from the download page.

New

This update adds new reporting functionality for both swimmers and parents.  Full details for a swimmer, including their primary and secondary contact, can be generated.  Output of HTML (in a web page) reports is now supported.

Bug Fixes

This update fixes a problem with the Update Swimmer function which resulted in the form being displayed again after a save but only when nothing was changed.

03.23.09
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wp-SwimTeam v0.0.310 available

As I noted in an earlier post, a minor update to the wp-SwimTeam plugin has been posted and is available for download.  This update fixes a the issues I encountered as I worked on the MacDolphins registration.  A couple of them were just dumb mistakes – some hardcoded paths that assumed the plugin path (from before I knew how to determine the plugin path).

While I was fixing the Report Generator I enhanced it – it can now export the primary and secondary contact details but only to the CSV version of the report.  The HTML report will be updated as well in the next day or two.

Note:  Make sure you download and install the phpHtmlLib plugin!  wp-SwimTeam won’t work with it.

03.23.09
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CSV Report Bugs

There is a bug in the Report Generator and the Roster CSV export which prevents the CSV file from being sent to the browser for download.  I ran into this with the MacDolphins this morning as I was working on our 2009 Registration.  I have fixed the problem and committed the changes, I will post an update later this afternoon of this evening.

03.16.09
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TSA Presentation

I have been asked to present the experiences of the MacGregor Downs MacDolphins with WinSwim and our team web site at the March board meeting of the Tarheel Swimming Association (TSA).

Our experience with Hy-Tek and ultimately WinSwim were significant drivers in the development of the wp-SwimTeam plugin.  I have made the presentation available for download.

[download#4#image]
03.16.09
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wp-Swimteam v0.0.307 posted

A minor update to the wp-SwimTeam plugin has been posted and is available for download.  This update fixes a few minor issues I encountered as I prepared for a presentation to the Tarheel Swimming Association.  I am changing the way the Guidance for each user and management tab is displayed.  What was previously a DIV is now a table and looks a little better and more consistent across browsers.

Note:  Make sure you download and install the phpHtmlLib plugin!  wp-SwimTeam won’t work with it.

03.04.09
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WPMU – easier said than done …

Over the last couple of days I have been playing around with WordPress MU (aka WPMU), the multi-user, mult-blog version of WordPress.  It has been on my “to checkout” list for a while but I haven’t had a compelling reason to do so until now.

I was asked to help set up some blogs for a group of soccer teams that are traveling to Europe later this year after doing one for my daughter’s team (one of the teams).  This seemed like a good opportunity to try out WPMU since I’d also like to do it for my wp-SwimTeam plugin and make it available to swim teams as a hosted service.

Downloading and installing WPMU was pretty straight forward but getting it to work with sub-domain mode blogs turned out to be a challenge.  I have concluded that without the ability to edit the httpd.conf file, it isn’t possible to make it work.  I did manage to get the sub-directory mode working but that isn’t what I need for the soccer team project.

So for now, I am going to abandon WPMU and set up a series of regular WordPress blogs, one for each team.  I am also looking at wp-Hive to help with this.

02.26.09
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Sandbox-Soccer Theme

Sandbox-SoccerOver the last two evenings I have created my first real theme.  I based on it on Sandbox and called it Sandbox-Soccer.  It is a three column theme with two sidebars on the right hand side.

My daughter is playing on a travel soccer team which is going to Sweden later this year and their coach would like to chronicle the team’s activities leading up to and including the trip and he asked me if I could set up a web site for them.  I used his requests as a compelling reason to get off my butt and design a theme.

Since I have little design expertise, I found some soccer related vector art on Wikimedia Commons and purchased some from iStockPhoto.  It is amazing how much art is available for free (Wikimedia Commons) and for a very reasonable price (iStockPhoto).

With my art in hand, I started working in Illustrator to come up with something I liked.  I had found the Watch Football Soccer WordPress theme a while back and I like the look and even downloaded and installed it.  However, like a lot of free themes, it  has some encrypted PHP code in the footer that does something.  I dug through some of it and it adds links to things I don’t want to link to but some of it I couldn’t get decrypted enough to figure out what it did.  Regardless, it was enough to concern me about using it so while I like the look, I didn’t like the implementation.

It turns out the artwork used in that theme is available from iStockPhoto.  There are also several other variations.  I like the silhouettes and found a collection of female soccer silhouettes (important for a girls team) created my own header graphic in a red/yellow/orange color scheme.

At this point it is usable but I will continue to tweak it too.  There are some CSS bugs still in it which I need to fix.  I also plan to do multiple color variations of it and have both male and female header graphics.  I’d like to set up the color and gender choices on a theme options page.

The demo is running on my Theme Demo page.  I will make a download available soon.