wp-SwimTeam v0.1.389 released

This evening I uploaded a new version of wp-SwimTeam.  It is available on the download page.  This version introduces a new report for swim meets.  The Swim Meet report’s most important feature is the listing of swimmers who have Opted-In or Opted-Out of a swim meet.  On the MacDolphins we call this a the Scratch List.

A parent can now indicate when their swimmers are participating (for meets defined as opt-in) or not participating (for meets defined as opt-out) on either a full meet or event basis.  The meet report will display a summary of swimmer participation based on the type of meet.

A couple of the options on the Report Form are disabled because they aren’t functional yet.  They will probably work in a day or two.

This release also introduces a new mode for Swimmer Labels – Frozen.  When Swimmer Labels are unlocked, they can be bulk assigned.  When they are locked, Swimmer Labels can be edited on a per swimmer basis but no bulk assigned.  When they are frozen, they can’t be edited at all.  I added this because I inadvertently reassigned the swimmer labels for the MacDolphins yesterday without meaning to.  Whoops.

I fixed a few other minor issues as well but nothing significant, mostly presentation of forms and such.

MacDolphins WordPress Theme

I have had a couple people ask me for the MacDolphins WordPress theme to use as a starting point for their own swim team.  The MacDolphins theme is built on top of the Sandbox theme framework and I am happy to share it.

I have toyed around with a couple of themes but this is the first one I think is robust enough to share.  It does have a few issues left to fix (e.g. sticky posts) and I hope to do that soon.  If you end up using this theme, please make sure to credit the Sandbox theme as without it, this theme isn’t possible.

MacDolphins Theme – updated 5/28/2009 @ 11:10 PM
[download#9#image]

Known Issues with v0.1.377

Last nigth the MacDolphins had our kickoff party – a fun event before practice starts on Tuesday. In getting ready for the event I ran into a couple things that I will fix over the next couple days. These are the things that I found don’t work correctly:

  1. Swimmer labels can be reassigned even when the labels are locked for a season.
  2. Swimmers labels are not exported to CSV from the Swimmers Report.
  3. CSV export for Roster fails from Roster Tab.
  4. Scratch fails with array out of bounds error.

I also changed how the registration e-mail works yesterday. Instead of filling out the e-mail template with the information from the user actually doing the registration, it uses the information from the Primary Contact.  I am finding that a number of parents are asking if I can “just take care of it” for them.  This change allows them to receive the e-mail even if the Admin performs the registration on their behalf.  This change is already committed and I used it last night but hasn’t been released in a build yet.

wp-SwimTeam v0.1.377 – Administrative Fields

I posted a new build of wp-SwimTeam this afternoon for download.  This build supports the new administrative mode for user and swimmer optional fields.  It has not had a significant amount of testing but I was able to run through quite a few scenarios and all behaved as expected.

This build also introduces a new type of optional field the NO-YES option.  This is similar to the YES-NO option but defaults to NO instead of YES.

Administrative Fields for Users and Swimmers

I had a request to support fields that weren’t visible to the end users when they used the system.  I decided to support these “administrative” fields as I have been referring to them by enhancing the optional fields for swimmers and users to be tagged as “user” fields or “administrative” fields.

When a field is defined as “administrative”, only users with WordPress permissions of EDITOR or higher will have the fields visible.  For all other users, they are hidden.  An Admin or Editor can change the value of the field and it will be saved when the user or swimmer data is saved.

The first practical usage of this is with a team that wants to mark registration fees as paid on a per swimmer basis.  Not the sort of thing you would expose to a parent but useful from a logistics perspective.

Both user and administrative fields are available in reports.

wp-SwimTeam v0.1.376 – bug fixes for Add/Register Swimmer

In the build I posted yesterday there were a couple of bugs which prevented the auto-registration feature to work when a swimmer is added.  There was also a bug in the age verification which allowed swimmers outside of the age range to added to the system and then registered for the active season.

If you download v0.1.375 yesterday, you will want to download v0.1.376 and update the plugin.

wp-SwimTeam v0.1.375 – Age Group Cutoff fixes and more

I have just uploaded  v0.1.375 of the wp-SwimTeam plugin to the downloads page.  This build fixes an issue with swimmers who have birthdates in close proximity to the age cutoff AND they are at the maximum age.  The calculation of the “adjusted” age was incorrect in some cases resulting in swimmers not being able to be registered.

In addition to fixing this problem, I added some additional error checking and validation around swimmer birthdates and registering for an active season.  The Add Swimmer capability now includes an “override” to allow swimmers who are too old to be added to the database.  This is being done to support team records, which likely has swimmers who have long since aged out of swim team.

This build also fixes an issue with database queries that appears from time to time when a large number of swimmers was in the database.  The query infrastructure has been improved to leverage the existing WordPress query structure.

There were also a few more UI clean up changes.

This build has not had an extensive amount of testing but I believe it is an improvement over the last build.  I hope to get some solid testing in tonight using a dump from the MacDolphins database.

wp-SwimTeam v0.1.371 – UI improvements, Opt-In, Opt-Out

This afternoon I posted v0.1.371 of the wp-SwimTeam plugin on the download page.  This build cleans up some UI issues and adds the baseline functionality for Opt-In/Opt-Out (aka Register and Scratch).

I have been noodling on how to implement the MacDolphins need for an online scratch sheet solution since I started this project.  It was one of the areas we really struggle with.  We’ve had a scratch sheet posted on the bulletin board for people to sign up on but it was ineffective.  We’ve tried using e-mail which worked better but getting the information from the collection point to the heat sheet continued to be problematic.  Hopefully connecting it to the web site will be a good solution to this ongoing problem.

The basic functionality is now working.  When a swim meet is entered into the system, it is characterized as either Opt-In or Opt-Out (the labels can be set from the Options menu).  An Opt-In meet requires all swimmers to register in order to participate.  An Opt-Out swim meet assumes all active swimmers are participating unless the swimmer withdraws from a meet (or subset of meet events).  For the MacDolphins, all dual meets are Opt-Out events and our local invitational city meet is an Opt-In event.

In addition to the new Opt-In/Opt-Out functionality (which doesn’t include reports yet), I made quite a few improvements to the UI, particularly with the messages which are displayed after an action is executed.  I also took care of some CSS issues which were most notable when using the default light blue Dashboard color scheme.  I prefer the grey one which is why I hadn’t noticed the problem previously.

The next phase of Opt-In/Opt-Out will be reporting followed by exporting a meet specific roster in SDIF format.

wp-SwimTeam v0.1.357 available

This morning I uploaded v0.1.357 of the wp-SwimTeam plugin.  You can download it from the download page.  Note the bump of the minor version number from 0 to 1 in this build.

This build completes the changes to the option model for the optional fields for users and swimmers.  In prior builds the optional fields were hard coded at 5 for both swimmers and users and the data was stored as part of the user and swimmer records.  This build allows an administrator to set the number of optional fields for users and swimmers (independently) and offers several new types of optional fields (required and optional URLs and e-mail addresses) and stores optional data in a separate table.

The extent of this change was pretty extensive which is why there hasn’t been a release in almost a month.  Unfortunately the old option data is not migrated to the new table so if you are using optional fields, you may have to re-enter some data.  I had to do this with my own swim team.  It is a nuisance.  The old data is still in the database in the users and swimmers table but not accessed.

This build also fixes numerous GUI nits with messages and guidance, it should all be consistent now although I am sure I have missed something.  It also fixes a bug with age groups when swimmer label prefixes are not being used.

I strongly recommend backing up your database before installing this update!