Glove Actually - Softball Team Website
During the summer of 2015 I joined a recreational softball team - Glove Actually. All the details about our league, the standings and play game schedule were available on the PHSA website but I found it rather difficult to navigate so I decided to create a website for the team gloveactually.mehaul.me. The website is build with Wordpress. I created custom shortcodes which when detected would query the PHSA website for the data and use Simple HTML DOM to parse and manipulate useful data and then display it on the page.
The tables that are displayed for Standings and League broke the page when displaying on a portable device so I employed FooTable to improve the browsing experience.
Soon after the website was launched, the team asked if it would be possible to have a place on the site where they could make their availability known. Utilizing AJAX and a couple of MySQL tables I was able to create a page that would allow team members to update their availability based on game dates. When users specify their availability, a JQuery AJAX request is sent to the server to save the data. I felt users needed to be informed that their details have been saved automatically so I used a jQuery plugin called Notify Bar to display an unobtrusive message to the user that their availability had been updated.
Since it is important to be able to see a list of who can attend and who can’t attend, I also provide the ability to download a CSV file which is simply output as text/csv response. Games are weather permitting; the PHSA offer updates through Twitter so participants will know if a game is postponed. I decided to make user of the Twitter Feed WordPress plugin to display the PHSA Twitter feed.