Category Archives: SVN

04.29.10
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wp-SwimTeam documentation?

Like a lot of projects, documentation for wp-SwimTeam is severely lacking.  It has been on my to-do list for a long time and I have been thinking about it recently.  I was heading down the Wiki route recently and actually got one set up.  I’ve never been a big Wiki fan but I do see their attraction for certain types of projects.

I personally prefer “real” documentation and by “real” I mean something you can print and read away from the computer.  I’ve always like the model that used by Version Control with Subversion has used.  The source is in DocBook format which means it can easily be produced as web pages, a PDF file, or an actual book.

Right now I am leaning toward using the DocBook format.  At a minimum I am going to try it and see how it goes.  Stay tuned!

04.23.09
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Update on the Option Model

I haven’t posted much for the last couple weeks – I have been very busy at work including a very short notice trip to Stockholm.  I have not had as much time to work on wp-SwimTeam as I had hoped I’d have.  Usually I can get a lot done on the flight home from Europe but not this time.  I had to fly Continental and the plane was packed – not real conducive to getting work done.

Anyway, I am back and have been working on re-implementing how I had handled the optional fields for users and swimmers.  It has always bothered me that I had hard coded five (5) optional fields in – I knew it was wrong but never bothered to work out a better solution.  Before I left for Sweden I implemented a new model which is loosely based on how WordPress handles user meta data.

I had completed the work on the user and swimmer profile aspect of the new option model but the Report Generator was broken as was the ability to export users and swimmers in CSV format.  It turns  out fixing the Report Generator was more involved than I thought it would be but I now have the User portion of it completed and committed to SVN.  Doing the swimmer report should be pretty straight forward, I can reuse most of the code.  The hard part is done, to do it for swimmers is pretty simple.

So what is the downside?  I haven’t figured out a good way to migrate any information currently stored in the old option fields to the new model.  For our swim team I think I am just going to manually re-enter since we have decided to eliminate one of the fields anyway.

On the upside, the new option models allows the site administrator to configure an arbitrary number of extra fields and fields can now be defined as URL, E-mail, Text, Clothing Size, or Yes-No fields.

01.22.09
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phpHtmlLib as SVN external?

I have noodled on how to handle wp-SwimTeam’s dependency on phpHtmlLib on several occasions.  Today I was at the gym with my mind wandering while I was on the elliptical machine, I started thinking about it again.

I am considering pulling it into the plugin as SVN external.  This would allow me to ensure it is always installed.  Doing this will greatly simplify the download and installation process for the end user as well which ultimately will make it easier to support users of the plugin.  The more I think about it, the better idea I think this is.  I need to read up on SVN externals!