Daily Archives: October 17, 2008

10.17.08
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More WordPress 2.7 Impacts

I updated one of my development areas to the current bleeding edge version of WordPress 2.7 this morning to see how things look.  Everything with my plugin still seems to work just fine – if you can find it!

I am torn with the new menu structure in the Dashboard.  I like the icons and how much cleaner they are but at the same time, it isn’t obvious where the menus for my plugin should live.  I expect I will have to make a new top level menu and icon.  I am glad the plugin still works but am a little concerned about the way it will integrate with the new WordPress Dashboard UI.

10.17.08
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Windows Live Writer

A while back I installed Windows Live Writer but then didn’t use it.  Yesterday I decided to give it a try, why it cropped back into my mind I am not sure, and I am very pleased with how easy it works.  While I like WordPress a lot, I find the Dashboard interface a nuisance when all I want to do is write a post.  It is fine for doing admin work but when all I want to do is post, having to wait for the Dashboard to load is annoying.

It is particularly bad on the Wp-SwimTeam site I have hosted on SourceForge.  For what ever reason, it takes a very looooong time for the Dashboard update services to time out (SourceForge doesn’t allow the remote connections) so it isn’t uncommon to have to wait a minute or so before being able to post.

I can really see the value of Windows Live Writer for a user like my wife who needs to post updates to our Swim Team web site but doesn’t need to be burdened with the WordPress Dashboard overhead.  Based on my initial testing, I like what I see.

10.17.08
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How to handle meet events?

Now that I have the standard events working with drag and drop reordering, I need to propagate events to each meet.  My thinking has been that a meet will start by importing the standard events and then add, delete, edit, and reorder as necessary to support a specific swim meet.

While I have had this model in my head, my first look at actually implementing it raised a bunch of questions – where I do put it?  How does it work?  The event management isn’t as simple as other meet management tasks so it sort of breaks in the way that I implemented the meet data.  I have an idea how to solve it but it will take some experimenting to see if it will work.