I posted wp-SwimTeam v0.1.417 this afternoon to the download page. This update adds new functionality and fixes a few minor things which have bothered me as I found them during the season.
The big new feature is a new shortcode – wpst_meet_report. This shortcode allows a the contents of a meet report to appear in a post or a page like this example on the wp-SwimTeam demo site.
The reports also now support hiding first and last names by only showing the initial as well as the ability to override the first name with a nickname if the swimmer’s profile has one. The missing ability to display a map on the swim meet report has been added so the checkbox on the form is now enabled. The reports can now display opt-in and opt-out information chronologically in the order they were added to the system as well as the previously available by name and by swimmer label.
I have spent quite a bit of my free time lately re-working my wp-SwimTeam WordPress plugin in a quest to get a demo site up and running. In the process I changed quite a bit, some because I had no choice, some because I was knee deep in the code and decided it was time to fix some things I wasn’t real happy with.
A lot of the work involved working with Google Maps API. The Google APIs are really pretty cool, if you need to do some work with AJAX or Javascript, they are worth looking into. I ended up using the new Google AJAX API (which can load the Maps API) and the new syntax. There seems to almost no performance degradation from loading Google’s JS libraries as compared to loading them directly from the host site.
A bunch of the work was neccessary because GoDaddy, the provider hosting the demo site, doesn’t support PEAR which I was using to access the database. I needed to migrate to the WordPress database abstraction layer. As opposed to just hacking up the plugin to do this, I decided to do it right and enhance phpHtmlLib with a new database abstraction layer specifically for WordPress. I also made the changes to phpHtmlLib to make it into a WordPress plugin.
All in all, a lot of work behind the scenes which isn’t visible to the end user but in the long will make using wp-SwimTeam by other people much easier. There are quite a few posts on my wp-SwimTeam development blog if you are interested in all of the nitty-gritty details along with my frustrations with GoDaddy Support.