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.
If your interested in having any help with this, I would be willing to lend a hand. While I am not versed in PHP, I am sure I can pick it up (spend my day developing in Java).
If you want to take a look at the source code, it is hosted on Google Code. The Flip-Turn project is sort of a dead end, I did it mostly as an experiment to model some ideas for processing results files. My plan is to fold the results of that effort into my wp-SwimTeam WordPress plugin. If you want to play with the code and prepare a patch file, I’d be happy to look at it and potentially incorporate it into the code.