wp-SwimTeam v1.21.790 released

This morning I released v1.20.790 of wp-SwimTeam.  This release addresses a bug which only appears on some hosting configurations where the URL http://www.example.com and http://example.com don’t resolve to the same place.   It isn’t clear to me why the server variables sometimes truncate the prefix but in some cases it happens and in some cases it makes a big difference.

Thanks to a couple teams for letting me access their site and chase this problem down as it doesn’t happen on my own sites.  This version makes use of the WordPress API (which I probably should have done that in the first place) to construct URLs for the tabs instead of parsing the PHP server variables. I’ve done a fair amount of testing on four different sites over the past 24 hours so I feel pretty good about the new implementation.

I have also incorporated this URL fix into the construction of the links on the Tabs for the Swim Team, Manage, Reports, and Options pages.  While I wasn’t having a problem here, the new solution is the “correct” way to construct the URL and should be more robust in different WordPress configurations.  WordPress has already figured out the various server configurations, no need to reinvent the wheel!

The update has been pushed to the WordPress Plugin Repository so you should see an Upgrade notification on the Dashboard soon if it isn’t already there.  This build is also available from the Download and Installation page.

wp-SwimTeam v1.16.704 now available

This morning I posted an update to wp-SwimTeam.

This release fixes a couple more places where the first and/or last name should appear but was being displayed as “N/A”.  It turns out I had re-used the same code which I had fixed a couple weeks ago in some other spots so the problem was the same.  This time I fixed it by moving the solution down into a parent class and eliminated a bunch of redundant code.  Hopefully it is gone but there is an outside chance I missed one.

Anyone who has used wp-SwimTeam may recall that the actions used to be buttons across the bottom of the widget I frequently use to display data.  This worked well until I had more actions than I had room for buttons.  My solution was to move the actions into a drop down list and many of the tabs used this model.  This release reconciles the inconsistencies so all tabs now use the drop down action model.

I have started work on some of the event changes I have posted about, hopefully I’ll have some new functionality in the next week or so.

Gearing up for Swim Team 2012

It will be summer swim team season before I know it so it is time to start gearing up for the upcoming season.  I haven’t really looked at wp-SwimTeam since last fall and WordPress has had several updates since then. I found out today that one of the updates causes the “real name” for the users not to be returned so that is first on my list of things to fix.  There are also some GUI inconsistencies that I’d like to fix.

This is my short list of items which I want to implement this season:

  1. New/update Swim Team theme.  This really isn’t related to wp-SwimTeam per se but our site is looking a little dated and it is time to freshen it up.
  2. Results Import:  I said I was going to do this last season and I never finished it.  I really want to get this done this year.
  3. Export of Meet Entries:  The wp-SwimTeam plugin has all of the informtation (roster, scratch list, event list, etc.) to generate a Meet Entries file in SDIF format.  Providing this file will greatly simplify getting a team’s entries into either Hy-tek or WinSwim (or any other tool which imports meet entries).  This will likely be first on my list after fixing the name bug and the GUI inconsistencies.
  4. Document all of the short codes on the wp-SwimTeam demo site.  I really need to do this.  It would make it much easier for new people to pick up the plugin and do something useful with it quickly.

Demo Site up and running

I have an initial demo site up and running at http://demo.wp-swimteam.org/.  The demo site still has a few issues but I expect to flush those out of the next week or so.  If you are interested in this plugin and want to play around with it, feel free to register with the demo site and add some sample swimmers.  It will give you a feel for how the end users uses the site.

If you’d like to explore the administration aspect of the plugin, go ahead and register and I will give your User Id the appropriate permissions.  The demo site has been populated with a bunch of dummy users and swimmers and a few swim clubs.  A sample schedule has been set.

One thing about going through the process, it exposed a few things I failed to include in the GUI redesign!  I’ll fix those issues in the next couple days.

Restructuring the Menus

I had some time today to work on the plugin and I was able to get a lot of the menu work completed that has been nagging at me.  I still have a little more to do though.  From the two screen shots below you can see that the icon in the Swim Team top level menu doesn’t look very good when the menu is active.  It looks find when another menu is active.  This shouldn’t be too hard to fix though.

I am pretty happy with the other changes I made.  The most notable being moving the Options tab off the Management page to it’s own page and breaking the huge form up into four separate forms.  The options (aka settings) are all now logically grouped.  I also fixed a couple bugs I encountered as I was testing it.

I also moved the Report Generator off the Management menu into it’s own page as well as I envision having several standard reports available in addition to the Report Generator.

wpstss01 wpstss02

Swim Team season is just around the corner!

Before I know it swim team season will be here again and it has been a while since I worked on the plugin.  Uh-oh.  This fall has been busy, busy, busy with other stuff and I put the plugin development on the back burner for a while.

Since I last worked on the plugin, WordPress 2.7 has been released.  WordPress 2.7 is so much better than any of the prior releases, going forward I expect it will be a requirement to continue to use the plugin.  The Dashboard integration will be much more elegant if I require 2.7.

Look for some new updates in the very near future.