Build .904152013

Even though last week was spring break for the kids, I spent a lot of time working on the site trying to get it ready for an official launch.  It's getting closer by the day and although I can still see a million things that I would like to add, it just has to go live and I can deal with everything else later.

First, the original template I used, while responsive, just didn't give me as much control as I would like for the site.  It was very hard to create a template with it, and I found that I just kept overriding the CSS to make it work and realized that would be a nightmare to maintain long term.  That's when I discovered bootstrap.  I had planned on moving to it someday and was only going to use it for new pages, but once I put it into use I was hooked.  I would say that it was a distraction going back to each page to clean up the site so that it worked with bootstrap, but actually it was a cleanup that needed to happen.

Not every page is bootstrap ready, I ran out of time for them all and felt that the longer I waited for a deployment, the greater my risk that something would go wrong.  Sure enough I broke the site last night while watching Game of Thrones and I'm still working on getting it right.  For those that want to know, PHP is tricky when using includes, especially includes inside includes.  Ultimately, its a path issue and I have the fix, I just have to get it in place.  The second issue was with a new feature.  I am creating a Lacrosse Only News Reader since one doesn't exist.  I'm using SimplePie as the aggregator, but its documentation needs work.  I used it exactly as the documentation suggested and it worked great locally, but when I deployed it started throwing "deprecated" errors.  Deep in the support I found the solution.  I love you SimplePie, just clean up your documentation a bit.

The following are the changes to the site for this build:

1. Bootstrap.js
1. global navigation - better user authentication/bread crumbs
2. iPad - navigation works with it
2. Marketing
1. started pages to explain what the site does and why you can't live without it
3. Stats
1. Limit game results to only those with stats (fixed bug in table sort)
2. Added additional reports
3. Player career works better (still has more work)
4. Team
1. completely redesigned
2. Org graphic
3. sub navigation for team info/coaches
4. sub navigation for games
5. Org
1. redesign started (not complete)
2. Org graphic
6. Home Page
1. RSS of this blog
2. Twitter feed for NCAA teams (will complete others, see below)
3. RSS of Lacrosse news
7. Social Integration
1. Created accounts and tie ins for Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, etc.
2. Share bar added in footer
8. Corporate
1. email/calendar
2. Phone number (Google Apps for biz now costs money so they are no longer an option [BOO HISS], props to Zoho!!!)

I've started the Social integration with the site and expect it to get more and more social as the features solidify.  I expect a lot more this week, notably some actual progress on my feature list which has not changed since I last wrote about it.  I also expect to have a news reader ready to go that will be publicly accessible (won't need a login for that) and a completion of the bootstrap conversion.