I quit working too late last night to post about the updates, so I’ll cover a couple days’ work now.
The biggest visible change was an update to the top site navigation. Previously, after logging-in, if you visited the home page or Tracker blog, there was no way to return to the system without logging-in again. Obviously, that was inconvenient. The home page and blog now both recognize an authenticated session and will display a new navigation link (that exists throughout the site now) to visit the Dashboard. This will get you back “into” Kilg.us without needing to log-in again.
The other big functional change is on the Add Player page. After receiving a report that adding a player was causing an alert in Firefox, I dug in to see what was happening. Unfortunately the alert was simply a slow script notice, not an actual error. What I ultimately determined was that the cumulative stat bubbles that I added the other day were causing an odd JQuery loop when the page is unloaded. Rather than trying to dig into JQuery to see what the problem was, I determined it could be alleviated by reducing the number of instances of the stat bubbles on the page. So the Add Player page now features pagination! Search results will be displayed 50 at a time with pagination links at the bottom of the page. This leads to quicker load times of the page, as well, so it seems like an improvement all-round.
Complicating the new Add Player pagination is the position filter. That filter literally filters down the players shown on the page, based on position. All it really does is turn off the display of players that don’t match the filter. So, previously, changing the filter to a specific position would cause a display of all players at that position. Now, changing the filter will only show the players among the currently displayed 50 that match. This seems confusing to me, so I think I will need to re-write how it works.
On a non-visible vein, I’ve incorporated the functionality to allow Users to view other Users’ teams. This is a precursor to the social-stat-tracking concept I’ve been discussing. There is no interface to share your teams with other Users yet–the relationship has to be manually set in the database. There is a new relationship type, though. Originally a team only had one User related to it: the Owner who had total control to do anything with the team they wished. Now there is a Viewer User type. This User type can only view the team. They cannot change the team name, delete the team, add players, remove players, bench players, or change the team’s stats. I’m hoping to waste a good chunk of time this weekend working on social-stat-tracking. With a lot of luck, I’ll have something working by opening day.
On a reality-strikes front: the iPhone web app won’t be ready for opening day. Once life settles down a bit, I’ll try to get back to it later this Spring or Summer.