I had originally planned on reproducing the behavior of some older “event calendar” type WordPress plugins but I realized late last week that the model they use will not fit Scouters’ Log very well. The “traditional” model requires each event to be created as a post. This works fine for special events but not so well for repeating events.
OK, the new blog is up (you’re looking at it) and we have a forum and wiki set up. Hey, we even have a facebook page! Time to get back to work on the real project.
I’m on vacation this weekend but will get to work on the event posting logic next week. Once I get a little farther along I will go back and set up something for tracking bugs and suggestions.
The Wiki is now live too (see link in menu above). Please use your OpenID, as I mentioned before, to keep your identity consistent throughout the site and so you don’t need to remember or store yet another password somewhere.
The project forum is now live. Your blog account should work on the forum as well but you might have to sign in again.
Please use OpenID for your registration if at all possible. Future features may require separate registration and I don’t want you to have to use a bunch of different passwords to access the different features; in fact, I would rather you not use any passwords at all. OpenID is great and, chances are, you already have one. Learn more at http://openid.net/.
The register_activation_hook function can be tough to debug since the only indication you get of an error is the infamous The plugin generated XXX characters of unexpected output during activation message. I found a nice solution to this issue at the WordPress Multilingual Plugin web site. Enabling WordPress debugging and PHP Error Logging did the trick. See the link below for instructions.
Link: Debugging WPML
Also, if you need to output some debug information along the way you can use the PHP error_log function to write to the, you guessed it, PHP Error Log.
After stumbling over WordPress’ dbDelta function I have decided to abandon it and “go my own way.” Thankfully I only have one table that I need to create so far. I think I am going to build a series of functions that progressively build the database based on the current database version and use a PHP switch statement to call the right functions. Something like this:
<?php
//Integer value, returns 0 if no version found
$db_version = get_db_version();
switch ( $db_version ) {
case 0:
upgrade_db_to_v1 ();
case 1:
upgrade_db_to_v2 ();
}
?>
I’m still undecided. A loop might work just as well but I can refactor it later if this gets too ugly.
I’m back at it. After creating a web site for our local Boy Scout Troop I have decided that it might be easier to create a WordPress Plugin for Scouters’ Log than to build a complex Windows application. I wanted to have some sort of web-based application associated with Scouters’ Log any way so switching directions will lead to a better overall solution and I can come back to the Windows app later on.
I have a history of not finishing personal projects but I think it is because I tend to over-complicate things and try to learn too many new things at once. WordPress and PHP aren’t too complicated so this should enable me to do a better job and actually make some progress.
The Clipart & Library repository at the US Scouting Service Project has a bunch of stuff but not much in the way of vector art. Not being an artist, I am still looking for a lot of art for the Scouters’ Log project. I won’t spend a lot of time on it just yet but as I find potential royalty-free clip-art I will update the following list of sites and search results.
There has been some progress on the project recently but it’s been tempered by some learning curves. You can read more about what I have been learning on my personal blog Wild Estimates.
I think I have a pretty good handle on Fluent NHibernate and will be learning some basic WPF next. I have built the basic object model for configuring the Scouting Unit and persisting it. Once I know enough about WPF I will start working on the UI.