I have been doing some testing with the WordPress Facebook Connect plugin. There are a couple sites I work with, particularly our swim team web site, MacDolphins.org, where I need users to login and add data to the site. Each year when we do swim team registration I get lots of questions about how to register, forgotten usernames and passwords, etc. With the popularity of Facebook, I am thinking that leveraging Facebook login credentials could make things a lot easier for me and our swim team parents.
As a test, I have installed it on the site I am putting together for my youngest daughter’s soccer team (CASL Sharks) to see how it works. For the most part, I am impressed – it pretty much works as advertised. I was able to login using my Facebook login and once my user was added to the WordPress user tables, I could change my permissions to allow my Facebook user id to post. I still need to do some work to support Facebook Connect for comments but the instructions look pretty straight forward. I think this would work well for the NCLTC and NCLUG sites as well although Facebook Connect requires PHP5 and those sites are hosted on a PHP4 based server so I’ll have to sort that out.
I use Flickr to host my photos and I’ve always wanted a better way to present them on WordPress blogs and this weekend I think I found it. Flickr-Gallery is a great plugin. It is easy to set up and use and it integrates well with my theme. It has a nice selection of short code options.
The only thing I use which is missing is the ability to link or preferably, display, a slide show. I shoot a lot of pictures of our kids activities (skateboarding, soccer, basketball, swim team, etc.) and sharing them as a Flickr slide show is something I do frequently.
I found a solution to the missing slide show by using the Light Window plugin in conjunction with the Flickr URL for the slide show I am interested in presenting.
For a while I have wanted this blog to be little more than an aggregator for some of the other thins I am working on. I thought LifeStream would do that and it does … sort of. LifeStream does a pretty good job of catching what is new, particularly from the Social sites (e.g. FaceBook, Twitter, etc.) and linking to it. What it doesn’t do is actually display content in a way where it can be read without leaving this site.
So I have moved LifeStream over to the sidebar using the LifeStream widget and reduced the number of feeds it monitors. In its place, I am now using FeedWordPress which is a plugin that monitors feeds and add the content as posts to this blog. Yes, some of the content is duplicated and I am ok with that. It allows me to have a single place where all of the content is available in one spot.
I prefer to post in content specific sites (e.g. on www.wp-SwimTeam.org) for certain projects so that material is self contained. But at the same time, I want that material to exist in the steam of all of the other things I am doing (this blog). So far it is working as I expected although I did end up with a category explosion when I added a couple feeds. That took a little while to sort out.
It seems like most of my free time has been consumed with swim team lately. I volunteered to help bring the MacDolphins into the 21st century this year and it has taken quite a bit more time than I expected it would. A lot of that is because it is fun working a technical problem and doing it right.
We had some goals for the season.
- Report results in a timely manner.
- Capture times and keep a history so swimmers and parents could monitor their progress.
- Electronic registration to minimize data entry errors.
- Communicate quickly and effectively.
After searching the internet for an existing swim team solution I determined there really wasn’t anything suitable do I decided to write my own WordPress plugin to address part of the problem. I had no aspirations to build a complete solution but I did want to offer something which addressed goals 1, 3, and 4 above. I started working on the plugin early this year and for the most part, it is working out pretty well. I wish I had a few more things done but I am happy with what I have been able to do.
For actual meet management, our team (actually me) ended up choosing WinSwim over the industry standard Hy-Tek solution. I went with WinSwim mostly because their support was excellent and their ability to import our roster electronically. For whatever reason, Hy-Tek has made doing this difficult if not impossible to do. (Read more on my wp-swimteam plugin blog regarding my dealings with Hy-Tek.)
WinSwim is easy to use but it hasn’t been without some problems. Fortunately they don’t seem to mind the volume of e-mail and issues I am sending them and they turn around solutions really quickly. To distribute the data our parents and swimmers want to see (mostly their times), I have learned quite a bit about Crystal Reports. It is pretty powerful once you get the hang of it but the learning curve is non-trivial. This weekend I think I had the “ah-ha” moment because now I am able to edit and create new reports pretty quickly.
The season is coming to a close and I still have a few things to do. I need to get end of season reports done for our banquet. I think this will be pretty straight forward now that I think I have a handle on Crystal Reports!
