Futures

Like any software solution, wp-SwimTeam has some holes which need to be filled.  Below is the list of features, in no particular order, which will be added prior to the summer 2009 swim season.  Yes, that is almost a year away but I do not want to be doing development during the season next year so I expect that most of these will be implemented in the next 3-4 months.

  • Scratch / Registration for meets (aka opt-in / opt-out) Complete
  • Define and Manage Volunteer Roles Complete
  • Volunteer sign up Complete
  • Pool and Team Records
  • Import Times and per swimmer historical time records
  • Heat Sheet Management
  • Export SDIF Entries for Swim Meet
    Complete
  • Import Events from .hyv or .ev3 files
    Complete
  • SDIF manipulation utilities
  • Additional Reporting

Of these, the Heat Sheet Management is probably the hardest because I want to implement an AJAX based drag and drop solution.  Developing a heat sheet is non-trivial because it needs to account for scratches and prior times, and late additions and deletions.  I suspect this will be the last feature from this list that will be implemented because it depends on several of the others and because I haven’t done any work with AJAX yet.

The ability to export entries for a meet based on the active roster and the state of the scratch (opt-in / opt-out) list is something I expect to add soon as it (a) should be pretty easy and (b) would help me quite a bit with the MacDolphins and the large number of scratches we have each week.  The ability to import Event Files from Hy-tek would also be really useful since they are pretty easy to come by.  This functionality was added during the Summer 2012 season.

I could spend a lot of time on reporting and probably need to do so.  Some of the initial reporting I implemented really needs to be redone and all of the reports need the ability to be exported as CSV so they can be manipulated in Excel.  Updating the reporting module is something that is unlikely to happen soon though.

14 thoughts on “Futures

  1. I like the addition of varying fee values based on age groups, since I suspect many neighborhood clubs do the same thing to encourage older swimmers. One other feature that may also be useful is to allow an option to set a maximum fee value on a per-family (user) basis. I know our club has such a limit so as not to over burden families with multiple swimmers.

  2. Any testing/statement on trying out WordPress 3.0?

  3. I did some testing with a 3.0 beta a while back and didn’t run into any problems but I didn’t test very much either. I found a couple minor things that I had to fix due to the error checking 3.0 does which required an update to the phpHtmlLib library.

    With two weeks left to go in the season, I am not going to update our site until the season is over.

    I’ve had a request from our Volunteer Coordinator to add another fields to the Jobs module so I’ll probably do that in the next day or two but for now, now immediate plans to do any extensive testing on WP 3.0. I will do it, but probably not before the season is over.

  4. Hi Mike.

    Any update to the Flip-Turn swim times feature? Also, how is the pool & team records management coming along? I’m liking where you’re going with this module…. Keep up the good work.

    • I have not worked on the swim times functionality in a while. The next project I will tackle is the ability to generate a meet entries for a swim meet. I believe that will help our team quite a bit this season with managing our meet line up. Once that is done, I’ll get back to working on results management. I won’t tackle team records until I’ve done results as they are somewhat related.

      I haven’t been completely idle either, I’ve updated my Sandbox-SwimTeam WordPress theme to fully support WordPress 3.3 and fixed a number of nuisance bugs while I was working on it.

  5. Hello, do you have an ETA of when we will be able to import Hy-Tek Files?

    • Can you elaborate on what you want to import and where? Do you want to bring Hy-tek data into wp-SwimTeam or import wp-SwimTeam data into Hy-tek? Currently you can export your wp-SwimTeam roster in either RE1 (Meet Manager Registration File) or HY3 format. I am guessing I will complete the export of meet entries in HY3 format in a week or two, largely dependent on how much time I have to work on it.

  6. Any idea when time imports and historial time records will be added?

  7. Maybe I’m missing it but how do I export rosters into hytek? Also, is there a way to have parents register their kids online and it populate the roster automatically in a pending format until they have paid and then change them to active…Hoping all of this is possible. Thanks for all of the work Mike!

    • You can export your roster in RE1 format which is an undocumented Hy-tek format that Meet Manager will read (Import Registration as I recall). As for your second question, there are several ways to do what you want to do. You don’t have to open your season for registration which would allow parents to register with the site and add their kids into the system but they would not be registered for the active season. This sort of does what you want but not completely because it doesn’t put them on the roster. What a number of teams do is set up a custom yes/no admin field for the swimmer call paid which they set to “no” for all swimmers and then an admin will mark the swimmers as paid as the parents pay their bill. That is probably the best way to do it.

    • I forgot to mention that in addition to exporting your roster in RE1 format which Meet Manager can import, you can also export your roster in HY3 format which Team Manager will import.

  8. Thanks, Mike! I managed to find what I was looking for….I attempted to do the custom admin field, but then it added additional details that didn’t line up. Still working on it and appreciate the assistance.

    Is there also a way that a league could use this in the same way, but as parents register their children it allows them to select the team they want to be a part of and then it will I can email coaches the roster based on team? I know this is a lot to ask, but hey I’m still learning and am very appreciative of what you have come up with. Thanks, again!

    • In its current state, the plugin will not do what you want to do. A while ago I did some testing with WordPress multi-site and the plugin will work in the multi-site environment. You could create a site for each team in a multi-site environment but that doesn’t help solve the problem of assigning swimemrs to a specific swim team.

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