Right, in the post below this one I said Uni-Sport will never be a facebook app in its current form. I’ll clarify that.
The USE (University Sports Engine) will never be a facebook app. Uni-Sport.org can be!
In January, I beta tested a simple RSS reader system that gathered statistics from the Uni-sport network and presented them in one big page. This type of functionality can be put into a facebook app. Basically, it’ll display news stories from the network and provide links for you to log in and talk on the forums, post news, read match reports etc. Not only does that involve facebook in Uni-Sport, (with USE changes) logging into facebook will allow you to see news stories in your facebook news feed, which then will take you to your Uni-sport site where you’ll already be logged in (by virtue of facebook’s active sessions)
You can expect to see this feature sooner rather than later
Well, facebook have certainly shaken things up a bit haven’t they. Almost totally opening up the API so developers can write applications that fit inside facebook itself! Utterly unheard of before, but potentially brilliant. Lets have a quick look at what you can do with all this new technology.
From the developer’s pages, developer.facebook.com they’ve created their own markup language, FBML. This allows for quick access to certain functions and their layout styles. Great stuff. You can also add in flash and mp3 files so people can listen to music. You can also add in an <iframe> element to display an off-site page. You can upload pictures from external applications and you can query the database using FQL (Facebook Query Language). This all sounds really great, but lets look at the limitations.
No Javascript – though not a surprise, some applications and advanced forms rely on it
No external stylesheets – boo and hiss to this one, all your styles must be in <style> tags
No AJAX – well, they provide automatic form submission, but that’s it. You can’t perform your own queries though the usual AJAX way
You can’t edit user details or post stuff to groups – still a bit disappointment as this limits the level of interaction with the user profile.
The big thing really is the ability to put iframes inside the canvas. From there you can do whatever you like inside the frame.
So, it all sounds good. Now it’s whether I can use it. Today I sent out an e-mail to all uni-sport.org members with a link to a survey on it (http://www.tigersurvey.com/survey.php?survey=2815) so I can get some feedback. One of the questions is about facebook and if people would want an extra feature, would it be better pictures, commenting, facebook integrates with profiles or uni-sport integrates with facebook in the way of an app. At the moment, I’m hoping a lot of people don’t go for the last option.
After some thought, I’m not sure if it would be possible to use facebook apps for such a complicated application as uni-sport. For it to work as it does at the moment, if a club asks for a web site, they will have to have their own unique facebook application. This is because of the team selection idea. If a group wanted to do team selection from within an application, only people in that group would be on the list. However, there is no way to make an application private between a group of people and AFAIK, no way to moderate who uses the application. There can’t be a global application as team selection wouldn’t work very well (it’d have to be select from people in network X who are members of group X, but that forces people to be in a group, which isn’t how it should work).
At the moment, Uni-sport is a glorified group page with team selection, match reports and a calendar. With team selection being at the heart of uni-sport, until private applications can be written, Uni-Sport will not be appearing as a facebook application.
Well, I’m glad that that decision has been made, now I can get back to my revision (lol)
Steve
Currently Listening to: David Ford
Currently Eating: Birthday Cake
Currently Reading: CSS Mastery and facebook documentation
Currently Watching: Lost season 3 finale. Amazing
Days left at University: 13
USE v3.05 ( Fantasy Hockey Update)
League table now links to teams and managers profiles
Create team allows for team names with ‘ in them
Profiles for other people’s teams displays correctly
Myteam budget remaining now has a £m formatted to it
Table pagination now works correctly
Anonymous and SS removed from top points
Fixed Picmenu delete bug
Two addslashes fixes
Delete match report empty array error
Transfer price fix
Fixed archives special characters bug
Fixed minor layout bug in gallery
Fantasy Hockey Logic Fixed
It turns out that the fantasy hockey bug was a problem with my logic. It works with a repeated function to calculate each person’s individual score then it posts those scores back into an array which are added to each team which has that player in it. Turns out that I was posting back the player’s total score for all time rather than just the updated score. So, I moved the individual player score database update to the repeated function and it returns the difference rather than the total. With that done, everything should work “flawlessly”…
So, it’s been a learning process. There are still minor bugs (there’s no admin menu for fantasy hockey) and v3.1 is quite a long way off. Development of v4.0 is slow to non-existent. Genesys work is slightly on top of me. Lots to do.
Anywho, next time, more features, i promise!
Steve
Currently Listening To: Damien Rice – 9
Currently Reading: Email… so much spam!
Currently Watching: Heroes
Currently Eating: Spag bog
Things to do tomorrow: millions
USE v3.04
Changed spelling of ‘location’ in add newsletter menu
Fixed RSS validation
Fixed email message output
Fixed ability to submit an email twice by accident
Fixed a CSS bug causing 404 errors
Fixed div bugs when access to a page was denied
Added ability to send email to all members
Fixed yellow/red cards not displaying in readreports
Yeah, I know what I said in the last post. I was incredibly annoyed when I had pushed 3.03 out the door only to run into another salvo of bugs. 3.04 has been much more of an incremental update than the last one so half the fixes have been out in the wide world all week.
I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten a final feature list for v3.1, but that’s been put on the back-burner for a bit until I get all my changes to uni-sport.org done (i.e. the demo sites are still on v3.02 and contain real data). I have also started exploratory coding on USE v4. The first task of which is to reproduce v3 exactly. After that… who knows what I’ll dream up, maybe even some satisfactory way to do sessions without copying phpBB exactly, a better way for people to configure RSS better, maybe even give people different templates and the ability to change their layout based upon a basic uni colour scheme. Maybe the site will even be secure! Pipe dreams my friends, pipe dreams, lol.
Other than that, things are goin alright. 5 paying clients are currently on my books and the White Rose Enterprise Agency wants to give me up to £500 to spend on stuff for the business. So, that’s an external HDD for secure code storage between computers; a CVS for dreamweaver; overheads for the year covered; professionally made business cards and logo; exams in dreamweaver and photoshop so i can get certified; and even coffee if i’m with a client. The perks of the job ya see.
Steve
Currently Listening To: Ryan Adams
Currently Watching: The start of all the tv shows i missed last year (and futurama)
Currently Eating: Ibuprofen and tomatoes (apparently I have a kidney infection)
Currently Reading: Background material….. how dull
Unnecessary hours of Genesys lecutures: all of them, all 12 hours *grrr*
