Nothing like a long flight to provide an opportunity to really look into wp-SwimTeam!  After fixing a couple more bugs, I started looking at Events as they are the foundation of meet entries.

A couple years ago I added Events to wp-SwimTeam but they don’t really do much.  It was the start of some new functionality that I never had the time to finish as fixing or enhancing other aspects of the plugin were always more important.

This season I really want to add the ability to generate a Meet Entries file directly from wp-SwimTeam.  In order to do that, the first order of business is to make sure the events associated with a swim meet can be managed.

Which brings me back to Events.  In looking at Events, the functionality I originally built is ok but has what I see as one pretty serious gap.  I allow the creation of a set of “Standard Events” –events which you can consider the base set of events that your team will swim most often, probably your home pool events.  This is ok because they can easily be added to an individual swim meet.

But what happens if you have a pool, like our home pool, which is measured in Meters and all of your opponents swim in Yards pools?  Even if the events are the same, you’d probably like to have a standard set of Meters Events and a standard set of Yards Events.  Now if I am going to manage two groups of Events, I might as well manage N groups of Events right?

I am toying with the idea of adding another field to the events table (Event Group) which would allow events to be assigned to a group.  Groups could be optionally defined (default to None).  Once Events are in a Group a Group of Events could easily be assigned to a swim meet.  Additional refinement at the swim meet level would still be supported.

I also plan to support the ability to import a Hy-tek Event File (.hyv) to either a specific meet or as a set of standard events.

I’ve got a couple more hours of flight time to noodle on this, we’ll see where it goes.